ADOW-SHAPES 



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SHADOW-SHAPES 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

The Journal of a Wounded Woman 
October 1918 -May 1919 

BY 

ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
1920 



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COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



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7 was wounded in the house of my friends " 



NOTE 

A FEW pages of Shadow-Shapes — images and 
memories of war-time Paris — were first published 
as correspondence in The New Republic during 
the years 1917-18. But the author owes the whole 
background of her French war experience to the 
paper and its Editors, and for their unfailing gen- 
erosity here makes grateful acknowledgment. 



PREFACE 

This book belongs to the nurses, the doctors, the 
friends who gathered about my hospital bed in 
France, Their beautiful kindness was as healing 
as their care, and I shall never be able to thank 
them for the part they gave me in the chimerical 
days which I saw reflected with such vividness 
in their faces. 

The best of what they shared and what they 
were I have not even tried to set down. But where 
their faces and their voices seemed symbolic of 
certain human types and mysteries pondered by 
all Americans in France in the period between 
war and peace, I have ventured to quote them and 
picture them. My wish has been not to change 
what I saw and heard by a line or a feature, lest 
the least alteration should do violence to a vast, 
embracing, unseizable truth that was essentially 
our common possession. The heightened glow cast 
by danger and death on the faces of the young, 
and its fading into the rather flat daylight of sur- 
vival ; the psychological dislocation of the Armi- 
stice ; the weariness of reconstruction ; the shift in 
Franco-American relations that followed Presi- 
[ix] 



PREFACE 

dent Wilson's intervention in European affairs; 
the place of American women in the adventures 
of the A.E.F. — all this and much more I groped 
through my illness to understand, as my visitors 
came and went, and noted on paper and in mem- 
ory. The journal which has resulted does not pre- 
tend to offer more than a marginal commentary. 
For nobody knows better than an accidentally 
wounded writer that the real story can only be 
told by a soldier — perhaps by one of those limp- 
ing privates whose shadows were always creeping 
across the Neuilly windows to remind me that 
in the damp tents where they were continuing the 
Argonne and the Marne, not in my comfortable 
gray room, was the substance of America in 
France. 

E. S. S. 
August 1920 



CONTENTS 

I. The Wing of Death , I 

11. Pax in Bello 47 

III. The City of Confusion 159 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

PART I 
THE WING OF DEATH 



SHADOW-SHAPES 



PART I 

THE WING OF DEATH 

Mont-Notre-Dame 
October 20, 191 8 

THEY have stretched a sheet around my cot 
this morning. It does not shut out the per- 
vasive poilu smell. And I can still see the young 
French soldier directly across the ward. Day and 
night he lies high against a back-rest. He has a 
great hole in his abdomen, and a torturing thirst, 
and cries faintly every two or three minutes: 
''Infirmier, infirmier, d boire, d hoire'' 

October 21 

The poilu can't be more than twenty. His eyes 
are caverns, dark wells of pain in a face blanched 
and shrunk to the angles of the bones beneath. 
They gaze out from under a shock of lank black 
hair that seems to grow every hour longer; gaze 
with the persistently hurt, surprised expression of 
a child who has put his hand in the fire, and finds 
that fire burns. When they first began to haunt 

l3] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

me, emerging from the murk of the tent and van- 
ishing again, early yesterday morning, I thought 
they were a sort of symbol. Ether bedazed me 
and I could not quite grasp the meaning of the 
symbol. I confused the poilu with a black- 
haired Oklahoma boy whom I found last June in 
a French hospital at Meaux; alone but for one 
muttering Arab in a vast, dirty ward; bedbugs 
crawling over him; blood soaking his shirt and 
blankets. The most lost and miserable American 
of all. 

Now his face stared at me, gaunt and craggy, 
from the French soldier's bed. I begged Mercier, 
my orderly, to change the Oklahoman's blankets; 
told him that my fellow-countryman could not 
make his needs understood ; insisted eloquently — 
and heard Mercier laugh — that he should take 
the "houses" off my legs. I was unable to help so 
long as their weight pressed me down. Mercier 
explained that they were not to be removed. But 
it was the poilu' s head, glooming clearer and 
clearer like a tormented ascetic head in a Spanish 
painting, that at last brought me to myself. I re- 
membered exactly what had happened to me and 
it seemed — seems now — altogether negligible 
in the light of that suffering stare. 

'^Infirmier, a hoire — just one little drop?" 
Valentin, the cross old orderly who passed just 

[4] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

then, tells him brutally to shut his mouth. It will 
be wet in due time, not before. And Valentin 
shuffles on, in his felt slippers, and his streaked 
grey-blue clothes, which depend flabbily from a 
loosely hinged backbone. Here comes Mercier, 
taking temperatures. Mercier is a generation 
younger than Valentin. He swings his muscular 
hips as he walks, as if he belonged to the Breton 
sea. But it seems that dans le civil he is a coiffeur 
at Le Mans. Mercier declares, after consulting his 
wrist-watch, that le petit must wait exactly nine- 
teen minutes for the next swallow of champagne. 

Miss Bullard, meanwhile, briskly reminds 
Mercier — who continues to stand poised, twisting 
waxed blond moustaches — that it is nearly ten ; 
only half the temperatures taken; no dressings 
done; several stimulations to be given men who 
are very low ; the surgeons due on rounds at any 
moment. Mercier looks crestfallen. Murmurs, 
with a half glance in my direction : 

'^ Je n'ai pas r esprit au travail ce matin — 
my mind is n't on my work this morning." 

Miss Bullard, as she hurries on, gives the little 
soldier a smile from under her white veil that 
brings a momentary look of peace into his be- 
wildered eyes. But soon the monotonous whim- 
per begins again : 

"A drink, a drink" — he is wanly beseeching 
l5] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

me now, as if I ought to be able to rise on my two 
splints and *'slip" him a few drops from the bot- 
tle on the shelf over his bed. A woman — not 
nursing — in an evacuation hospital — during 
an attack. . . . 

Have I said anything else to myself these two 
endless days and nights? Raw flesh — shat- 
tered bones — pain — fever — thirst — disability 
— death. Why should I be caught up into this 
revelation of tlie ultimate of war unless I can turn 
my understanding to some service? 

There is one unbearable sound. A dull, pierced, 
animal plaint, nothing like the usual moan of 
pain, or the cries of the wounded who are being 
dressed. A sort of sigh went up from the whole 
ward when it began. Miss Bullard dropped every- 
thing and ran, though the man she left is only a 
little less in need. Her look is fixed as she pre- 
pares her hypodermic in the alcove beyond my bed. 

She works so swiftly, so gallantly. Did she 
realize when she put me in this corner near her 
table of supplies, the satisfaction I should get 
from the perfection of her technique? From 
simply seeing her, single-handed, single-hearted, 
direct a whole hospital and meet the outstanding 
needs of her twenty-four grands blesses? She must 
have known it would be a spiritual substitute for 
the nursing she would be giving me under other 

[6] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

circumstances. She can do only the essential now. 
Racked and lacerated as I feel, I am yet one of the 
least serious cases. Two thirds of the patients are 
just barely being kept alive. She literally does 
not stop one second in the twelve hours she is 
here. Even so, she is consumed (as I have seen 
Lucinda consumed at Dr. Blake's hospital this 
last six months) by the desperate need to do more. 
Miss Bullard sleeps a mile away, in a ruined vil- 
lage, in a room with no window-glass and no stove. 
She has to walk there again for lunch. Only a 
sort of exaltation keeps the human machine go- 
ing through such stress. She must have been 
drawing for months on springs far deeper than the 
normal springs of human energy and endurance. 
She sends Mercier to tell me, as her fingers fit 
rubber tubes together, that she will make me 
comfortable for the day before long. I am ashamed 
that I do want to have my face washed, that I do 
want to feel her soothing touch at my feet. The 
soldier she had to desert is two beds away from 
me. His face was considerably shot to pieces. 
He has to be fed through a tube. But he lies 
there dumbly patient and quiescent. 

Afternoon 

Yes, only those who cannot help themselves ask 
for anything here — at least by day. I believe I 

[7] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

was conscious of it even those first irresponsible 
hours. For when I heard my own voice calling 
Mercier — as it did so often — I was amazed 
and repentant. Extraordinary how quickly one 
becomes part of the mechanism; how one can 
bear anything in company. Just because it is war, 
and must be borne. C'est la fatalite. Inevitable. 
Irrevocable. Immutable. Interminable. Nothing 
exists, or ever will exist but this khaki tent 
pitched in the mud; this rain that drips, drips 
through the roof; these two blind rows of closed 
window-squares ; this stove that smokes ; this back- 
breaking cot; these grimed and stuffy blankets; 
this clinging smell of damp, and coal-smoke, and 
iodine, and disinfectant, and suppurating wounds, 
and human sweat and dirt. Yet to name the ob- 
vious discomforts is to exaggerate them. They be- 
come submerged in a more profound initiation — 
an initiation which is almost a compensation. 

A visitor has made this clear to me. The 
medecin-chef, full of apologies for not having him- 
self visited me sooner, ushered him in. They came 
mincing down the ward together, between des- 
perately sick men of whom they seemed quite un- 
aware; the medecin-chef, in his unsullied horizon 
blue, looking a sort of operatic tenor after the 
hard-pressed, shabby surgeons I have so far seen ; 
the visitor an elongated, dapper personage from 



THE WING OF DEATH 

the Maison de la Presse. He had journeyed all 
the way from Paris, in his best rue Frangois F^ 
uniform, to bring me ''the condolences of the 
French Government." 

A camp-stool was provided. The stove was 
belching saffron clouds that rose and hung under 
the floppy canvas. The attention of the blesses 
was glumly superior. The visitor sat there shiver- 
ing, coughing, fondling an imperceptible mous- 
tache with one nervous hand, blinking away 
smoky tears, as he made polite conversation. 
Drops trickled down his neck. His reddened eyes 
took in my bandages, the "cradle" that raised 
the bedclothes over my feet. But what they 
dwelt on with fascinated commiseration were the 
fragment of my skirt that Miss Bullard had 
pinned about my shoulders and the pillow she 
had improvised, — Gertrude's coon-coat, which 
luckily came through intact. (The hospital has 
no bed-pillows, and only three back-rests.) 

''How uncomfortable you must be, Mademoi- 
selle!" 

Poor Monsieur, not nearly so uncomfortable 
as you, though I tried hard to make your half- 
hour as easy as I could. 

One thing I do mind — greasy old tin plates. 
I can swallow sickish tea, and limonade that 
never saw a lemon, and gratefully, when Mercier 

[9] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

holds the china "duck" to my lips. But when he 
brings me onion-scented soup, full of vague, float- 
ing vegetables, in an ancient, ancient tin recepta- 
cle. .. . He was very proud at lunch -time. He had 
succeeded in finding an egg, a very round and 
orange fried egg which skated madly over that 
dubious black surface. It was perfectly cold. 
But I choked it down with a humble fear that I 
was being pampered. 

I am pampered. I have sheets. Miss Bullard, 
of course, produced them. And though she had 
been up all my first night, she went the long dis- 
tance to her room and brought back a nightgown 
and comb of her own. Even a new toothbrush, and 
a box of ** Dorin Rose." (Dorin Rose! The visitor 
should have noted that pathetic effort to be faith- 
ful to feminine tradition.) As my cot is curtained 
off, she keeps the window in the Bessano tent open 
over my head. The French surgeons allow no air 
to blow through the ward, and as soon as she is 
gone at night the orderly zealously shuts my port- 
hole from the outside. 

I dread the moment when Miss Bullard goes 
for a good many reasons — the moment when I 
am left alone in this world of anguished men. It 
is then that it is most intolerable to be helpless. 
If only I could do the small things the orderlies 
neglect once the nurse's eye is off them. Even 

[ 10] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

during Miss Bullard's lunch-hour — if she takes a 
lunch-hour — there is a more restless spirit among 
the blesses. They talk of her from bed to bed. 
Her drole de frangais, her funny French, which 
they delight in ; her capacity ; her sympathy ; her 
well-earned Croix de Guerre, After all, they say, 
why should an American woman be nursing 
Frenchmen? There are no French nurses here. 
''Elle a hien du merited But soon they begin to 
wonder why she is n't back; begin to fuss. And 
at night, when she has given the last hypodermic, 
and put on her cape and stolen out, black desola- 
tion settles down over the tent. 

October 22 

Last night the ward was like a sombre tunnel, 
full of smoke and noxious gas ; monstrous moving 
shadows; painful reverberation. Feet, feet, tram- 
pling, trampling; brancardiers, shuffling into the 
tent with new burdens. Shall I ever forget how 
their feet are sucked into the glutinous mud of 
the Marne? It is as if the mud were insatiable. 
And it gives out, in the dark and silence, the muted 
sound of all those other stretcher-bearing feet 
which it has sucked and strained at for four years. 
Mont-Notre-Dame was an important French 
hospital centre until the Germans took it last 
spring. On the recovered ground a French hos- 
[ II ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

pital has been planted again. And yet again come 
the brancardiers bearing still, horizontal shapes 
on their shoulders, shapes once vivid, earth- 
loving; now writhen, agonized, indifferent. War is 
a doom, trampling, shuffling itself out to eternity. 

And the orderly on duty last night was a dod- 
dering old fellow who let the men get completely 
out of hand. It is no kindness, as I have discovered. 
The least serious cases make the worst row. The 
''thigh" began it: 

''6 Id, m, Id, Id, Id, Id, Id, Id'' — each "6" a 
note higher in the scale and the ''Id's'' running 
down in Tetrazzini's manner. 

* ' C'esl-il-mal-heur-eux, c'est-il-mal-heur-eux, ' ' re- 
sponds the **arm" in the next bed, who has no 
intention of being outdone. 

^'Damnee guerre, damnee guerre," echoes the 
''shoulder blade." 

This had been going on perhaps fifteen minutes 
when the little poilu opposite me tore off his 
bandages. Patience is a terrible virtue. Would not 
wars end if ten thousand wounded men tore off 
their bandages and bled to death? But the process 
is hideous. The vieux, badly scared, called Mercier, 
and with much stifled gasping and cursing they 
together bound him up again in the flicker of a 
lantern. 

Can it be that only forty or fifty miles from here 
[ 12 ] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

people are discussing, over partridge and fraises 
des hois, whether it would be better for Foch to 
accept an armistice or to push the Germans to a 
complete debacle? Better give a few months more, 
and several thousands more men, say some. I 
wish they could spend a night in my cot. Can it 
be that in Paris I, too, believed in the end of the 
war? The very evening before my accident, the 
evening of the day when the French army entered 
Lille, I came out of the Castiglione, after dinner, 
into light. Light in Paris at eleven o'clock at 
night. Light after nearly four years of war-dark- 
ness! Those great torches, flaring brazenly from 
the Tuileries terrace, on brazen enemy guns 
strewn over the place de la Concorde, conveyed, 
as they were intended to do, a sort of shout of 
triumph. The enemy had been driven so far, so 
far, that not the boldest or fleetest of his bombers 
could any longer threaten the heart of France. 

Yet here the fear of air raids is not conjured. 
I shall not soon forget the whirring pulse that 
throbbed and burrowed into our tent tunnel in 
the small hours of last night. Ominous, discom- 
posing. Airplanes, squadron after squadron, pass- 
ing just overhead. Boche or our own? The com- 
plete defencelessness I felt so long as the uncer- 
tainty lasted made me aware that w^hat I had 
hitherto taken for moral courage during raids w^as 
[ 13 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

purely physical; a pair of good legs and a con- 
venient mediaeval cellar had sustained me. I know 
something about the psychology of the bomber, 
too. Great to drop off your load on a group of 
tents ; to get a direct hit, a tongue of flame. (Lord, 
it was a hospital !) 

After all, I am just as bad as the men at night 
but for New England pride. My soul also escapes 
from what Jules Romains would call the unani- 
misme of the ward ; from the bonds of a common 
fate which enjoin a decent patience. I become an 
impotent, aching creature, full of unpleasant 
holes, lost in a corner of devastated France infi- 
nitely remote from every one I care for. The 
hospital unit had moved up from Chateau- 
Thierry the night before I got here. No telephone 
connection with Paris yet. So I cannot get cables 
through to my family in America; or to the N.R. 
I can't even telegraph my brother-in-law, Ernest, 
at Dijon; or Colonel Lambert at the Red Cross; 
or Rick, who has just lost his brother, on top of 
losing almost his entire squadron in the Argonne, 
and is due in Paris on leave. He wired me the 
night before my accident to cable his mother ; and 
there should be an answer by now — and I of 
no use. 

I ask for tea. The orderly comes running. {'' Ca 
change J unefemme,'' thinks he. And I — "I can't 
[ 14 ] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

see his dirty hands in the dark.") But tea is no 
sedative. I hug my stone jar of hot water tight 
but I can't escape from memory. The memory 
that my work has come to a fortuitous end just as 
the war approaches its final crisis. The memory 
of the accident itself. These three nights, which 
have dragged like as many centuries, I have 
relived it, step by step, image by image: a series 
of sharp, visual images strung together by blindly 
logical circumstance. 

Four American women, with a Frenchwoman 
in nurse's uniform, their guide, are descending 
from the train at Epernay, where they are met by 
a French officer. Plump, pink, smiling, the officer. 
They have come for an afternoon's drive to 
Rheims and the American battle-fields of the 
Marne, and will return to Paris via Chateau- 
Thierry in the evening. 

Ravaged fields, shapeless villages. . . . Soon 
the Lieutenant has stopped the motor by a steep 
hillside. The battle-field of Mont-Bligny, very 
important in the defence of Rheims. He warns 
us that it has not been "cleaned up"; that we 
must touch nothing unless we are sure of its 
nature. 

The ladies stream up and across the field, lit- 
tered indeed with all sorts of obscene rubbish. 
Some one finds a German prayer-book. Some one 
[ 15] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

else an Italian helmet. There may be a skull in it, 
warns the Lieutenant; but hangs a French one on 
his own arm for me. Mademoiselle has a queer- 
looking object — a series of perpendicular tubes 
set in a half-circle, with a white string hanging 
down at either end. The inside of a German gas- 
mask, she says. We all walk across the hilltop as 
far as the holes dug in the ground by the forward 
French sentries ; we look toward the German lines 
beyond — then turn back along the crest of the 
hill, where it drops off sheer to a wide valley. The 
Lieutenant, Mademoiselle, and I are ahead, the 
others some fifteen yards behind. Suddenly the 
officer notes what Mademoiselle is carrying: 

**Put that on the ground, please," he says 
curtly. ''I am not sure what it is." 

A stunning report, a blinding flash, and I am 
precipitated down the bank, hearing, it seems, as 
I go the Lieutenant's shriek of horror: 

''My arm, my arm has been carried away!" 

I lift my head at once: two women cowering 
with pale faces, then running toward the road; 
the third standing quiet by a stark, swollen fig- 
ure — the Frenchwoman, stretched on her back, 
with her blue veils tossed about her. Great gashes 
of red in the blue. 

''Macabre of the movies" . . . and aloud I hear 
a voice, which is mine, add : 
[ i6 1 



THE WING OF DEATH 

^'She is dead.'' 

''Yes Terrible." 

I seem oddly unable to get up. Ringing in my 
ears. Faintness. The effect of the explosion. 
Very tiresome, not to be able to help. I crawl 
farther down the hill to get away from blood. 
But something warm is running down my own 
face. Blood! I sit up and take out of the hand- 
bag still on my arm a pocket-mirror. Half a 
dozen small wounds in my left cheek. Unimpor- 
tant. But my eyes fall casually on my feet, ex- 
tended before me. Blood! Thick and purplish, 
oozing slowly out of jagged holes in my heavy 
English shoes and gaiters. I seem to be wounded. 
Queer, because no pain. I call to one of the women. 
She makes a meteoric appearance, tells me I am 
splashed with blood from the dead; is gone again. 
I must, I think, lie down. The chauffeurs seem to 
be above me on the hill now, carrying the officer 
away. A long interval. They are bending over me. 

''Can you walk?" 

"riltry." 

It does n't work. So they make a chair with 
their arms. One of them is grumbling that the 
other women aren't on hand. 

''Les blesses sont plus interessants que les morts — 
the wounded are more interesting than the dead, " 
he remarks. 

[ 17 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

From my ''chair" I note more objects, innu- 
merable objects similar to the one that exploded, 
straggling like octopi in different parts of the 
field. The soldiers grin when, in a voice of warn- 
ing, I point them out. Hand-grenades, they say. 
Now we have reached the first limousine. The 
ofhcer is propped on the right half of the back 
seat, his bloody sleeve (not empty yet) hanging at 
his side. I am lifted in beside him, my shoes re- 
moved, my feet placed on the folding seat. Those 
nice, expensive brown wool stockings from "Old 
England" ruined. . . . 

The chauffeurs refuse to wait for the other 
ladies. Must find hospital at once. Unpleasant 
sensation of severing all connections with the 
friendly world. Inhuman country. Badly rutted 
roads. The officer, quite conscious, desperately 
worried : 

'* I did tell them not to touch anything, did n't 
I, Mademoiselle? They'll break me for this." 
Repeated again and again. Also the reply, '*It 
was n't your fault. Monsieur." 

A bleak barrack at last. An amazed ^^ major,'* 
who sticks his head into the bloody car. But can 
do nothing for us. Gas hospital, this. Surgeons 
eight kilometres farther on. I feel pain at last and 
the Lieutenant is suffering. But we talk a little — 
about his wife, and his profession of teacher. 
[ i8] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

Will I write to his wife to-night for him? Say he 
is not so badly hurt. . . . 

Dusk already. Two more dreary barracks in a 
plain, lean and grey. Another French doctor, 
black-bearded and dour. Very displeased to see 
both of us, especially the woman. Two stretchers. 
The Lieutenant disappears in one direction while 
I am carried into the triage and dumped on the 
ground. To be tagged, I suppose, like the wounded 
I have seen in the attacks of the last year. At 
least twenty Frenchmen lounging in this barn- 
like place. Orderlies, stretcher-bearers, wounded 
soldiers, all pleasantly thrilled. 

*'We must cut off your clothes, Madame." 

* ' Bien, monsieur ^ 

I can be dry too. But if there were the least 
kindness in his grim eyes, I should tell him how 
desolated I feel to be giving so much trouble in a 
place where — ' I know it as well as he — women 
are superfluous. 

Compound fracture of both ankles. Flesh 
wounds from eclats. A little soldier writes out a 
fiche in a deliberate hand while I am being ban- 
daged, and given ante-tetanus serum. The fiche 
goes in a brown envelope, pinned on my breast as 
I lie on the stretcher. 

**Is it serious, Monsieur?" 

"The left foot, yes, very." 
[ 19] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

"Can I not make connections with the rest of 
my party, so as to send a message to Paris?" 

No, the chauffeurs had gone already. I am 
to be sent to a hospital near Fismes. And the 
stretcher proceeds to the door. Stygian darkness 
now. As the men slide me into the lower regions 
of the ambulance I look up and see, peering down 
from the top layer, the very white, rolling eye- 
balls of two very black Senegalian negroes. 

*' You thought you 'd be alone? " remarks the dry 
surgical voice. ''No . . . Bon voyage, madameJ* 

The ambulance door seems hermetically closed. 
How the engine groans on the hills. . . . How 

heavily the black men breathe above me How 

my foot thumps. . . . How the hammering on the 
wheels pounds in my head when we break down. 

Another lighted triage. I am lying on another 
mud floor, surrounded again by men, men. Per- 
haps I am the only woman in the world. . . . But 
the atmosphere is more friendly. An orderly ap- 
proaches : 

"You have three compatriots here." 

"American soldiers?" 

"American nurses." 

Were ever such blessed words? And the tall, 
sure, white-veiled woman who comes in to take 
my hand, and not reproach me for my sex, seems 
to divine just how I feel. Croix de Guerre y with 

[20] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

palm — Mayo graduate — can this be the nurse 
who lived so long in a cellar at Soissons, nursing 
American soldiers? I put her in a Red Cross article 
months ago! A presence to inspire instant confi- 
dence. 

''Only a bed in a poilu tent," she apologizes. 
** Impossible to make a woman comfortable." 



The bed is grateful. Long, long wait. Finally 
a surgeon with a woman assistant materialize 
beside me. Surgeon with red face and shabby 
uniform, and, as bandages unroll, a troubled 
look. He says immediate operation is necessary. 

Miss Bullard confides me to an orderly, Mer- 
cier. She cannot see me again to-night. Must pre- 
pare two hundred new arrivals, blesses of yester- 
day's attack, for operation. Mercier seems kind. 
To be brought out of ether by an ex-coiffeur is 
normal, after all this. When the stretcher-bearers 
come he helps them lift me; wraps blankets about 
my bloody and exiguous clothing. He says he 
ought not to leave his ward, but he comes along 
beside the stretcher, snubbing the brancardierSy 
who are lower in the hospital hierarchy than 
infirmierSj as I have already discovered. The 
movement of the stretcher on these human 
shoulders is soothing, though. And the rain that 

[21 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

falls on my face from the black night. Too bad to 
leave it for the lighted X-ray room, so narrow and 
stuffy, and full of perspiring men. They can't even 
find the eclats. I point out where they must be. 
Long wait on the floor. At last the summons to 
the operating-room. 

The surgeon is ready. In a white blouse, with a 
large black pipe in his mouth. He removes it to 
caution the men who are lifting me on to the 
table: 

" Voyons, voyons! Don't you see it is a woman? " 

A true Gaul. Unable not to point the ruthless 
fact. 

I turn my eyes to the green-painted ceiling. It 
is spotted with black, black like the surgeon's 
pipe. Flies. The assistant ties my hands to the 
table. (In peace-time, I reflect, they wait till one 
is unconscious.) The surgeon is bending over my 
wounds now, shaking his head, and his next phrase 
has no double meaning, and his voice no irony : 

''All because a foolish woman wanted a little 
souvenir of this great, great war. ..." 

I am getting ether in large quantities. Sensa- 
tion of vibration — of waves beating, and through 
it voices very clear: 

''Who is she?" 

"A journalist." . . . 

* * * 

[22] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

The tent again. Blackness, clammy chill, pene- 
trating pain. Mercier's hands smell strong of 
cigarettes. Kind Mercier, washing my face very 
tenderly . . . 

October 23 

They are going to evacuate me by the noon train 
to-day, with a lot of other wounded. The sur- 
geon says my progress is sufficiently good and of 
course my bed is needed. He has been in to give 
me special recommendations for the American 
surgeon (whoever he may be) who will next have 
me in charge. 

This is less of a toiibih, as the poilus call the army 
surgeons, than I thought. He may look, with his 
arms bared to the elbow, and his scrubby beard, 
and his scrubby clothes, like a caricature by Gus 
Bofa. But he has spared no pains for me, and 
Gallic to the last has packed my injured mem- 
bers in the whole hospital stock of peerless and 
priceless absorbent cotton. He has left the small 
wounds on my face alone: 

''Can you suppose I would touch anything so 
delicate as the face of a woman?" 

I am leaving with a dominant sense of the fas- 
cination of surgical technique. As so often in the 
past, my mind has come to life and helped largely 
[23] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

in saving my nerve. The limitations of this plant 
are greater than those of any similar American 
hospital I have seen, except perhaps one field 
hospital. Its externals are less inviting. But I am 
inclined to believe that so far as essentials go good 
workmanship is rather more scrupulously ob- 
served here. Certainly the surgeons take a more in- 
dividual interest in their cases. I have watched 
the surgeon of this ward — who is not mine — 
making rounds every day. No detail is too small 
for his attention, and he has a personal relation 
with every man. He is visiting the evacuables 
now, urging each one to write back a full account 
of his journey and progress. 

The medecin-chef has come to say good-bye. 
I was not mistaken in thinking him the operatic 
tenor of the hospital. He stands at the foot of my 
bed holding one of his numerous '' paperasseries'^ 
poised before him, like a sheet of music — an order 
from M. Clemenceau, urging that all considera- 
tion be given me. With that in my hand I am to 
be ''descended" from the train near Vincennes, 
at the regulating station for Paris wounded. ''The 
regulateur will have made all arrangements." I 
wonder? I have been able to communicate with 
nobody. And now I must leave Miss Bullard, my 
rock of safety, my friend, and journey away 
alone on a stretcher. I don't want to go. 
[24] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

Miss Bullard has dressed me in more of her 
garments (my own completely demolished) even 
to a scarf, that was her mother's, about my head. 
Gertrude's fur coat on top. The brown envelope, 
with records inside, again pinned to my chest. 
Great bustle in the ward. The orderlies are assist- 
ing the departing blesses into their tattered uni- 
forms and tying up their war treasures — such as 
the eclats that have been removed from their 
wounds. They are very particular about the 
exact number, and I am not at all in fashion not 
to have kept mine. 

Mercier presents a last tin plate of soup. He 
insists gruffly that I have been no trouble, no 
trouble at all. The sun is slanting on the tent 
floor for the first time ; the stove swallows its own 
smoke. The little poilu opposite is better. His 
face is less pinched, his eyes several sizes smaller. 
He has reached the stage of patience. He looks on 
me as a sort of friend now, though we have never 
exchanged a word, and I feel as if he were re- 
proaching me for going off to a better fate than 
his. I can't myself believe that these twenty- 
three men, whose tragedy and comedy — not 
much comedy, but that of a rich Rabelaisian 
flavor — have been mine for four days and nights 
are no longer to be the very core of my life. I 
can't believe that this tent, which at first seemed 
[25 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

so sordid, and now seems so sheltering, will soon 
be only a brownish dot in the distant "war zone.'' 
I don't want to go. 



On the train 

I AM actually enjoying the adventure. Such a 
golden October afternoon. Its warmth and the 
vanishing pictures of the country-side I catch 
through the window of the corridor have given 
me a new breath of life. 

When it comes to the point, I like having to 
put through something hard alone. Alone! That 
is one of the charms. For the first time since I left 
Paris I am by myself — my stretcher on the seat 
of an old first-class compartment. Only once in a 
while does the train orderly — rather superior 
personage; antidote to the train doctor who is 
eminently an inferior personage — come in with a 
brown teapot to talk of his wife in Montreal. 

The train is in no hurry to get to Paris. It is 
wandering hither and yon, to pick up wounded, 
and makes long, long stops. We are still in the 
midst of devastation but I am spared most of it, 
for from my stretcher my eyes hit just below the 
skyline. A row of yellow beech trees. Three 
French soldiers perched on a village roof, hammer- 
ing and laughing in the sun. Now an elemental 

[26] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

figure projected against the blue heaven — a 
peasant woman ploughing. Ploughing through 
hand-grenades and unexploded shells. The season 
of mists and mellow fruitfulness will have its way- 
even here. Perhaps the war is nearly over. 

The war. What does it mean? Had I even a 
glimmer of its significance all this past year when 
I was writing about it, before it really got under 
my skin? 



"Unreal as a moving-picture show,'* an Ameri- 
can editor said to me last week, of his recent first 
journey to the front. That is the way it looked to 
me when I first visited the Oise and Aisne and 
Somme — only an October ago. The limestone 
twelfth-century ruins of Tracy-le-Val, overgrown 
with bright flowers, had a beauty not unlike that 
of Delphi. Tragedy, but of the Greek order. 
Tragedy one could regard with a certain detach- 
ment. On this last disastrous journey I had to 
force myself to look out of the motor at the 
skeleton villages of the Mame. They seared my 
eyes. Parched my understanding. Every splinter 
of masonry had a human implication. The dead 
loss to civilization was past bearing. 

[27 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

Knowledge of war has come by a gradual ab- 
sorbent process, a sort of slow penetration with its 
dark background. As it affected the French na- 
tion primarily. And especially my French friends 
in Paris. Their lives at first seemed surprisingly 
normal. But gradually these lives came to ap- 
pear subtly distorted, as faces are distorted by 
a poor mirror — or by a hidden fear. And their 
spirits: when their once so vital and humane 
spirits were not full of sinister images they were 
empty, as the streets were empty during those 
drab, dragging months that preceded the German 
spring offensive. The months during which the 
growing numbers of Americans in the Y.M.C.A. 
and the Red Cross were discovering the restau- 
rants, and taking war like the rain. 



What was war to the A.E.F.? In the beginning 
"a great game,'* played with wharves, and freight 
yards, and storehouses, and ice-plants. A great 
game: I shall never forget the spur to hope that 
pricked me during my journey from one end of 
our army to the other in the early months of this 
year; the sense I got of the constructive force that 
moved it. But the end of March changed all that. 
For America only less than for France war then 
became a drama: intense, vibrant, lurid. A drama 
[ 2S ] 



THE WmC OF DEATH 

that went on steadily in one's own inside, what- 
ever one's superficial activity, and that might 
well have a tragic ending. 

Not like Greek tragedy any longer. And the 
front and the rear are continuous. Refugees, Red 
Cross men dashing back and forth from their 
posts, fighters on leave, wounded; the big gun, 
the raids, the fleeing industries and banks — 
Paris is now the war zone. America is at Cantigny 
on one side, at Belleau Wood on the other. 
Paris is Germany's objective. Paris is ourselves. 
Paris is the heart of America, as well as the heart 
of France. 



Paris is saved. But the war goes on. Deeply 
and yet more deeply is America involved. Not in 
her brains only — in her flesh. In the flesh, above 
all, of those tall, sinewy young men in the twenties, 
who swing so smartly and so sternly down the 
Champs Elysees on July 4th. Those young men 
who should be the future of our country. Our 
finest. If one begins to know now what war means, 
this is the reason. Sympathy for French or British 
never brought quite this look into American faces. 
All the girls who are caring for French orphans 
and refugees feel they must nurse; pour out their 
life blood, too, in night watches; steel their nerves 
I 29] 



SHADOW'SHAPES 

too, by holding firmly the ghastly mutilated limbs. 
Their former chauffeurs and farmers are their 
brothers; their children. Dearer, because so help- 
less, and bereft, and in pain. 



How soon will Stewart and Rick be lying on 
hospital cots, or worse? Where are they at this 
moment? The blind query, intensified since my 
accident, has been gnawing at my consciousness 
these two months past; since the little Anglo- 
American lieutenant of twenty — so much more 
philosophical than the tall American lieutenant 
of twenty-seven — disappeared toward the Brit- 
ish lines after our walk in vietix Paris; and the 
radiant Californian treated me to a last lunch at 
the Ritz before Saint- Mihiel. Both great lovers of 
life and of France. Both fully expecting to die 
some fine morning, "doing a definite thing for no 
very concrete reason," as the American put it. 
Both taking a simple and immense pride in their 
dead comrades, a pride devoid of heroics. In the 
war they are fighting there is no place for either 
oratory or vindictiveness. " I have never wasted 
ten minutes hating the Germans," says Rick. 
The British lieutenant has n't either. But he has 
lost, as the American has not, all zest for war in 
itself. He envies his American cousins their faith 
[ 30] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

and enthusiasm, goes back to the front with a 
rather wistful serenity. While the CaHfornian 
is passionately longing to achieve his aviator' 
destiny. 



This generation of the twenties has been the 
important one, in every country, since 1914. Its 
reactions to war are rawly honest, not befogged by 
convention, like those of older men. And Har- 
vard, and Yale, and Princeton, and California, 
feel just as much need to talk and write them out 
as Oxford, and Cambridge, and the Sorbonne, 
and the Ecole Normale have done. In the last 
year I have learned a good deal about how the 
tremendous business looks to half a dozen very 
diverse young Americans. To Ernest, doing his 
responsible job in the rear of the A.E.F. ; to Tom, 
at his governmental post in Paris ; to two or three 
Red Cross men; to Rick at the front. Rick at 
Saint-Mihiel, in the Argonne, flight commander 
of a bombardment squadron, sending letters from 
the thick of the only war activity that has any 
romance left. 

''If I come out of it," he writes me, "I shall 

look back on it as the only reality amidst all the 

pale mirages of experience I have known. There 

is no experience possible wherein man is not at 

[ 31 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

grips with ultimate fate. The only contrast is the 
contrast of life with death, and the only living 
making nothing of life. I seem unable to stay 
out of the air here. If I miss a raid I am wretched 
until my turn comes again. I don't seem to know 
myself. I am neither a hero nor a degenerate. I 
have found no new surprise in Archies ; only a new 
slant on an old subject in real war flying. And 
yet my whole state of being has shot up like a 
rocket. I am having (I suppose literally) the time 
of my life. That is the final consolation to death 
in battle. It does n't much matter what happens 
once the climax comes. The men I saw go down in 
flames yesterday were friends of mine. I knew it. 
Even that didn't matter. It's the damnedest 
thing." 



I am not to be persuaded that love of adventure 
makes war good, any more than the spirit of 
sacrifice, or the patient endurance of pain. Is it 
good for the world, for his mother, or for the boy 
himself, who is so gifted for life, that Rick should 
be killed? And for how many individuals of the 
millions of fighters has this war, after all, been 
good? To prolong it by one unnecessary day, 
hour, minute, would be criminally wrong — of 
that, at least, I am sure, after the evacuation tent. 

[ 32 ] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

Like the soldier, I feel no bitterness and very 
little surprise at my individual lot. At every 
stage I have said to myself: *'So this is what it is 
like" — to drive from hospital to hospital, for in- 
stance; or to lie on the floor interminably while 
indifferent people walk about and brush your face 
with a foot or a skirt. Certainly I did not want to 
be hurt. But I have still less right than the soldier 
to complain. Voluntarily, for the sake of my pro- 
fession I ran a risk — slight it seemed — and luck 
was against me. 

Mine is no more than a pin-point of sharp 
experience in the vast catastrophe. Yet its stab 
unites me to millions of other human beings. To 
the little poilu of the hospital who, under other 
circumstances, might have accepted a franc for 
carrying my bag across a platform. Unanimisme 
. . . what potency it has. It is that which keeps 
war going. Every American in Europe to-day, 
however bad his fate, feels in his heart of hearts 
glad to be here. Glad not to miss the great ad- 
venture of the years 1914-18. For whether war 
be good or bad, whether it means purgation or 
damnation for civilization, it is still the adventure 
of these years. And if one shares, why not up to 
the hilt ? Why not pay the piper? 

There my logic fails. I am willing to pay — ■ 
perhaps; I don't yet know how heavy the price. 
[33 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

But not to let others. Not the little poilu. Not 
the man with no face. Nothing must happen to 
Ernest, far from his wife and baby. The war 
must end before Mary loses her second son. Be- 
fore Rick goes down in flames. 

Dark now. And I am suddenly terribly tired. 
The hard stretcher has eaten its way into the very 
marrow of my back. The doctor takes my tem- 
perature with a frown. Says we shan't arrive be- 
fore ten o'clock — ten hours' journey. He has 
had too much pinard. So has the orderly. I have 
a sneaking hope that somebody somehow knows 
I am coming. If only, oh if only I might find 
an American face — Gertrude's? Ernest's? — on 
the platform. . . . 

American Hospital of Paris, Neuilly 

October 24 

I AM reincarnated. As a perfect lady, in a perfect 
sick-room, full of flowers. Flowers after Mont- 
Notre-Dame. And the peace of being alone 
within four spotless, grey-white walls. Fresh 
white curtains, white cushions, white furniture. A 
long French window into a garden. October tree 
traceries — black and gold and purple, like Ver- 
sailles — against the sky. A bell-rope, the genius 
of which is a beautiful young Alsatian girl in blue 
and white, who brings lemonade made of real 
[34] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

lemons that quench fever; tea on a tray with 
dainty strips of toast; ungreasy bouillon; eggs re- 
fined to custard; hot-water bags which yield to 
pressure instead of repelling it. I wonder if can- 
tankerous souls exist who think this hospital a 
prison? 

I have been in a state of exaltation ever since 
Colonel Lambert got my stretcher out of the 
ambulance, well after midnight, and down the 
white corridor which ended in a white bed — 
with pillows! A night-nurse with melting Por- 
tuguese eyes. A middle-aged surgeon in a dress- 
ing-gown. A hypodermic. This was Neuilly. 
Blissful haven. 

Much good M. Clemenceau's recommendation 
did me, though. I still hear the grey-beard of a 
regulating officer ranting over me in the hospital 
tent at the station, while I tried to hold on to my 
self-control and my wits. (High fever and great 
pain by that time.) Ranting because he did not 
know where to send me; because the ambulance 
boys hadn't come. The hour they took in 
coming . . . 

And the face that peered into the little window 
of the ambulance from the driver's seat when the 
"boys" deserted me in the velvet blackness in 
front of the Hotel de France et Choiseul. ''An 
apache,'' I thought. On the contrary, the poor 
[ 35 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

old literary night-watchman, blubbering over my 
hand, nearly in his emotion tolling the bell that 
roused us so often for raids to give notice that 
here I was again. Several sympathetic shades of 
my dead life collected about the ambulance, as it 
was. And the Colonel, spruce and good-humored 
in spite of the hour, climbed in and sat himself 
down on the other stretcher, as if for our usual 
war gossip. How many times did he say, "I'll 
be damned" on the way to Neuilly. For once I 
made the Colonel sit up. 

The whole of my previous existence in war- 
time Paris returned with a rush this morning; as 
normally as if the sealed world of Mont-Notre- 
Dame, the world bounded wholly by pain and 
death, the world where only wounds and poilus 
existed, had never been. But for that slowly 
winding train, which somehow linked the two 
together (how often have I similarly readjusted 
my universe between Boston and New York!) I 
should be dazed to find myself once more in 
the midst of war-rumor, political discussion, and 
familiar entities like the Y.M.C.A., the A.R.C., 
and the A.E.F. It was the blue and grey ''Y" 
that came dashing in first, in the person of Ger- 
trude; red cheeks, solicitous eyes sparkling through 
her glasses, armfuls of fruit and flowers, and stores 
of her rarer gifts of high spirits, generosity and 

[ 36] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

humorous human interest. And then the steel- 
grey Red Cross, personified in R, M., with her 
warm, wise smile and limitless capacity and kind- 
ness. Both assuming my responsibilities, rein- 
forcing friendship with the power of these great 
organizations that I have spent so much time 
studying and criticising. (Glad I am now always 
to have maintained that their virtues outweigh 
their deficiencies.) 

Then came along the men, Lippmann and 
Merz, Arthur Ruhl, Tom, and others, all equally 
human and concerned. The New Republicans also 
shoulder my responsibilities, and I am ashamed 
to remember that I once thought W. L. a cold 
intellectual. My stoicism would certainly ebb 
away from contact with this flood of friendliness 
and flowers, if every one were not so obviously 
relieved, especially the men, to find me not a nerv- 
ous wreck. The crisis is very near, they think. I 
must get to work again. In fact I have engaged 
a stenographer for next week. If convalescent 
poilus make bead chains in bed, why should I not 
string words together? 



My little blue-and-white nurse reproves me for 
writing to-night. Perhaps I am tired, for the 
doughboy voices from the garden disturb me. It 

[37] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

is my heart, not my nerves, that the A.E.F. 
troubles. The garden holds a Red Cross tent 
hospital, an overflow from ** Number One,*' the 
big Ambulance in the boulevard Inkermann. 
The wounded — in khaki here — are hobbling by 
my window, on crutches mostly, to their supper. 
Rattle of tin plates. End of a lighted tent project- 
ing into my field of vision. It is unjust that I 
should be enjoying daintiness and luxury, under a 
real roof, while soldiers are outside where rain can 
drip and stoves smoke. And the worst of it is that 
it will soon seem natural that I should be here and 
they there. 

October 25 

My fate as a hlessee is in the hands of an American 
surgeon of remote French descent, who appears 
to be even more of a Francophile than I am. A 
Southerner, with very Gallic airs, and almost 
Provengal loquacity. I already know much of his 
family history — great surgical family. Grand-pere 
volunteered under Napoleon and made the retreat 
from Moscow; p^re, Deputy-Surgeon General of 
South in Civil War. He himself volunteered in 
the French Army at the beginning of the war, and 
served three years before transferring to the A.E.F. 
He operates half the day here, and half at '' Num- 
ber One." He has a casual manner, jollies the 
[38 ] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

pretty little nurses in a Franco-American jargon 
of his own (good accent, though). He would like 
me better if I would only laugh at his jokes or 
cry pathetically while being dressed. I can barely 
preserve a stony silence. He handles my wounds 
like a connoisseur, not to say a lover of wounds. 
I can't altogether cheat myself into thinking I 
have returned to the old world, though. Not so 
long as I have a daily dressing. The intensity 
of apprehension I feel when the surgical cart is 
wheeled in, and my bed wheeled out, and the 
surgical nurse begins to undo things, humiliates 
me. For I do not believe in the importance of 
physical pain — until my leg is lifted out of the 
splint. Then I don't believe in anything else. 
Dr. M. cheerfully tells me to yell. He says the 
difference between French and American wounded 
is that the Frenchmen howl, but keep their arms 
and legs still, and the Americans mutely sweat, 
but wriggle in all directions. He congratulates me 
on the work of the French surgeon who, it seems, 
did a very skilful job in saving the left foot at all. 
That information sends a cold shiver to my utter- 
most parts. 

October 28 

The face of the world changed again. I am to 
have the wounded soldier's experience, jusqu'au 

1 39] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

bout. Infection in left foot. It set in on Friday 
evening. The work I imagined myself beginning 
to-day is remote. Virtue has been trickling out of 
me, and fever and pain flowing in. How did I ever 
write at the other hospital, on the train? All I 
care about now is quiet. And air, fresh, cold air; 
because I feel stifled and contaminated. And a 
nurse, a quiet nurse, always there. R. M. has sent 
one; fair, pink-cheeked, shy, slow, steady. A 
Norwegian Red Cross nurse, from a North Da- 
kota farm, just landed; the very antithesis of the 
quick, sophisticated little French pupil nurses 
who have been in and out like humming-birds. 

Visitors eliminated. I could n't even talk to 
Ernest when he came hastening up from Dijon 
yesterday. I could n't even bear the sound of his 
voice. But the affection in his eyes sustains me 
yet. (Fine, frank, judicious brown eyes.) That 
is something I dare let down the bars of stoicism 
to — family affection. More sustenance there than 
in the rather dubious words of Colonel Blake, 
whom Colonel Lambert brought in consultation 
this morning. (Shall I lose my foot yet?) Our 
most distinguished American surgeon looks the 
part, with a becoming greyness. Acts it, too. 
Dr. M., whose '' specialite " seems to be always to 
be somewhere else when demanded, failed to turn 
up on time. 

[40] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

I have just had my first irrigation with Dakin 
solution, through two Carrel tubes in my left foot. 
Now I know how that feels, too. I little thought, 
when I accepted Dr. Flexner's invitation to hear 
Dr. Carrel lecture on this great contribution to 
modern surgery at the Rockefeller Institute, that 
those lurid Pathe pictures of wounds would soon 
have such a personal import. May my wounds 
heal with the miraculous rapidity which Carrel 
described ! 

At best It will be a slow business. Hospital till 
January at least. The doctor told me the first 
morning that I should eventually walk comforta- 
bly ''on a level." My face must have fallen, for 
he Inquired, with a twinkling glance at my many 
bandages, whether I was an Alpinist. Could n't 
I make ascensions by funicular? I have been 
haunted ever since by the fear that I may never 
climb Page Hill, Chocorua, or High Pasture, 
Dublin, again. I am just as much in need as ever 
of their wild, sweet, junipery flavor and their 
spacious views. No more different because a hand- 
grenade has hit me than Rick is different because 
he has dropped bombs on Germans, 

October 30 

I WAS wrong. Rick Is changed. Not by drop- 
ping bombs, probably. By his brother's death, 
[41 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

and the decimating battle of a month ago. Grey 
and stern he looked as he stalked in. Scarcely a 
flicker of his happy young smile. Moving heavily 
instead of with his usual light ease. 

He sat down in the corner of the room farthest 
from my bed, and regarded me broodingly, out of 
eyes black in their sockets. Not as if he were 
sorry for me. Not as if it were odd that I should 
be in bed with wounds and broken bones, and he 
intact. Rather, aggrieved. As if this were just 
one straw too much. 

The rest of his reconstituted squadron has gone 
to Nice on leave. He "does n't like the new men. 
Could n't stand that sort of thing anyhow, just now. 
But he counted on my being as usual, more than 
usual, perhaps, a sympathetic ear, a safe family 
friend, a literary comrade — some one to see him 
through. And I am of no use. (He did n't say it, 
any more than the poilu at the hospital said it, 
but he looked the same reproach.) I can't even 
eat a meal with him. 1 elicited the fact that he is 
eating alone, at the Cafe de Paris. Why the Cafe 
de Paris? Not like you. No. That's it. Because 
he never ate there with P. Cx R. or the other eight 
friends who were blotted out at the end of Sep- 
tember. He could n't go to Voisin's because it was 
there that he found his observer eating that his- 
toric gourmand's lunch — tended by six waiters 
[42] 



THE WING OF DEATH 

holding the choicest wines of the cave in their arms. 
Nor could he go — well, anywhere. He is paying 
in one large lump for all the leaves (and especially 
the A.W.O.L.'s) he has taken here in the last 
year. 

Were they all killed, the men he lost? Probably 
some prisoners. The ghastly part is that he lost 
track of them for about fifteen minutes, when his 
plane was out of control. His observer — who 
was his closest friend — shot dead, fell on the 
rear controls, and he could only steer blindly into 
Germany, pursued by twelve Boches with forty- 
eight machine guns. When he came to, there was 
just one of his six planes behind him. The young 
pilot was going across for the first time. Wonder- 
ful pluck, the way he stuck to Rick's tail. That 
was what got Rick back again. (He never admits 
his own bravery.) Now young P. has been lost, 
too. He must go to see the family in Paris. It 
seems that he does nothing but look up the fami- 
lies — or write to them. . . . 

How many times have you been shot down? 
Three. Never a scratch. He showed me, hanging 
on his wrist, one of the bullets that embedded it- 
self in the plank under his feet on September 26th. 
The plane was a total wreck. 

He has received answers from my cables to his 
family. His mother has been splendid. (Tough 
[43] 



' SHADOW-SHAPES 

luck to lose B. Tough for the boy not to have got 
to France. To die in a camp of pneumonia. He 
can't talk of that.) She says he is not to try to 
get released on her account. So he will go back 
to the front. Go back soon. Paris is a graveyard. 

The doctor had allowed my visitor five minutes. 
But how shall I send him away if he gets any dim 
comfort here; sitting on in the corner, tilted on 
two legs of the stiff chair, his long, straight, power- 
ful profile, ending in a jaw two sizes too big, out- 
lined against the grey wall. Rain-in-the-Face. He 
might just as well have his aviator's helmet drawn 
over his head. For there is where he is: at the 
front. He is quite unaware of the effort I have to 
make to drag my voice out of the depths of my 
head. He is sunk in trouble ; completely immersed 
in that intense and violent world whence he has 
come. 

It seems impossible to write his mother a cheer- 
ful letter, as I have done after his other visits to 
Paris. How should I write of anything but war as 
I see it now? War choking itself out in spasmodic 
breaths through dank nights in hospital tents. 
Faces blackening into death. Fine, straight young 
limbs turned rigid. And why should Rick get 
through, even now, though such a natural adven- 
turer? The zest is gone, and that may be just 
enough to turn the scales of his luck. There is no 
[44I 



THE WING OF DEATH 

reason why he should n't be killed on the last day, 
in the last hour. 

Finally he gets up. Lights a Fatima abstract- 
edly. Says he has a taxi eating its head off out 
there. Sticks on a jaunty cap. Shakes his broad 
shoulders in his smart, French-cut uniform. Gives 
a faint flicker of a smile. Avoids shaking hands. 
But stops at the door an instant and looks at me 
with a sudden hope. Perhaps I have a panacea? 
No, there she is, ill in bed. Wounded. For one 
second he seems to take that in as it affects me. 
Hastily extinguishes the Fatima. Then he flickers 
again, and is gone. Back to the front. 



PART II 
PAX IN BELLO 



PART II 
PAX IN BELLO 



November ii 



STILLNESS. Intense stillness. Try as I will 
to throw it off, it muffles my bed like a heavy 
blanket. Or like one of those mosquito bars that 
smother you in Italian hotel bedrooms. I lie un- 
derneath, on my back. Always on my back. 
Immovable and straight. Holding my ears rig- 
idly clear of the pillows — listening. No sound. 
No faintest echo of this glowing gala night. Only 
stillness, soft, spongy, clinging. Stifling me in its 
pale web. 

The garden, all I can see of it by turning my 
head very gently to the right — I must not stir by a 
hair's breadth that distant part of my bed where 
my aching feet abide — is full of white moonlight. 
The black trees that frame the clustered tents are 
spattered and silvered with it. Hoary old trees. 
Safe Red Cross tents, with eyes of yellow light 
that twinkle boldly to the lady who floats aloft. 
Two months ago the moon gathered bombers as 
an arc-lamp gathers moths. A thing of dread. 
And now how large, and round, and clear she 
sails. And what soft security she floods upon our 

1 49] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

garden. This is the fifteen hundred and sixty- 
first day of the war. After fifteen hundred and 
sixty-one days the women of the world may go to 
bed with quiet hearts. 

My heart is n't quiet. It is pounding and throb- 
bing under the bedclothes like one of those air- 
plane motors that are always disturbing the air of 
Neuilly when I most long for peace. I wish I could 
hear an airplane now. It is desperately still. If 
the doughboy who twangs the wretched banjo that 
daily jars through my pain were only marooned 
in the garden. I would give any three soldiers 
five francs each to start a row. . . . Not a sound. 
Every patient who can hitch himself along on 
crutches has got into Paris somehow. Armistice 
night. The culmination of the most terrible four 
years in the history of the world. The only 
wounded left, out there in the tents, are like me, 
tied to a bed. Too ill to do anything but listen. 
Listen and strain for a celebration we can't hear 
— and perhaps can't feel. Our war is n't over — 
as the femme de menage put it this morning. 

Strange somebody is n't travelling over the 
Neuilly boulevards. There should be at least one 
belated taxi with a horn, carrying a smart French 
colonel just arrived from the front toward Paris. 
At least one cab, drawn by a tired horse, pounding 
back with a family of petits bourgeois who keep 
[50] 



PAX IN BELLO 

early hours because of the gosses. . . . Utter si- 
lence. All day the hospital walls have trembled 
with the reverberation of great trucks from the 
munition factories along the Seine. Trucks carry- 
ing the French work-people to Paris. Through the 
double door of my room, which usually deadens 
hospital movements, I have caught a murmur 
of suppressed excitement. Nurses' voices raised 
above the usual careful level. White shoes patter- 
ing at the double-quick. The surgeon, urging the 
young ladies in his warm Southern manner to 
hurry along and feter la victoire. When he came to 
do my dressing he was very impatient to be gone 
himself. (His face looked worn above his white 
gown. He is n't altogether glad the war is over, I 
surmise. More surgeon than humanitarian. And 
not very keen to leave his bone-grafts at '* Num- 
ber One" and his Paris nights for private practice 
in a sleepy, stolid Southern city.) Hours since I 've 
heard the least twitter in the corridor. As deserted 
as the garden and the street. If I thought it would 
make a sharp, strident sound, I would lift my left 
hand and squeeze the bell that is pinned to the bed 
near my left ear. But it only lights a small, red, 
silent electric flame, they tell me. What's the 
use? 

Dr. M. promised me a bottle of champagne to 
drink to victory. It did n't come. Miss O., my 
[51 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

Red Cross nurse, was more disappointed than I. 
She ''had never tasted champagne," and glowed 
at the wicked prospect. Rather dismally, at last, 
she tucked in the extra pillows, my only substitute 
for a change of position through the night, and 
wondered whether the trams had stopped run- 
ning. She, too, wanted to get away from wounds 
and pain. To see and touch this Paris gaiety of 
which she had heard so much in North Dakota, 
and scarcely dared open her eyes to when she 
arrived. Poor boulevard sights. No, I could n't 
have drunk to victory with some one who did not 
know what Paris was like last June, when the Ger- 
mans were only forty miles away. And champagne 
is a mild stimulant by comparison with this pain 
of mine. A black, misty, mounting flood which 
sweeps me off, tosses me back and forth like a cork 
on its tide. 

The tossing and swirling do not muddle my 
head. Somehow they clarify. Never did my 
senses feel so acute. If one of the wounded men 
should get up and dress (eluding his night-nurse), 
and drag himself over to the iron fence that shuts 
in our garden, and whisper to a little French girl 
through the bars, I should surely hear her an- 
swering: '*I loove you." Yes. But there isn't 
even a lover's whisper in the clear, crisp, empty 
air that comes through the window. The little 
[52 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

French girls have forgotten the wounded dough- 
boys. They are in the ''centre," dancing around 
laughing, drunken, vociferous, rich American offi- 
cers — generals* aides and quartermaster captains 
— on the once-more lighted boulevards. What 
pictures swim before me. If I can't hear I can 
at least see. . . . 

Rainy French ports. Mellow old French cities. 
Barren French villages — all full of olive-drab, 
brown-faced Americans, celebrating the Armi- 
stice. Dazed they must feel in the mud of our 
camps, the manufactured cheer of our canteens, 
the high efficiency of our railway centres. Just 
so much stage scenery now. But the hospitals 
are not stage scenery. Base 15. Savenay. Evacu- 
ation Hospital Number One — bitter reality. I 
see a wounded soldier with hollow Lincoln eyes, 
and a lantern jaw. He has a hole in his abdomen. 
He is crying for water. . . . What is it like at Mont- 
Notre-Dame to-night? 

The petit chasseur breaks in on my visions: it 
is only at this evening hour, when my nurse is 
gone, that he dare thrust his clipped, Boutet de 
Monvel head, with its impishly demure round 
face, inside my door. A big envelope with the 
Embassy stamp. Out of it this huge proclama- 
tion, which was placarded over all the walls of 
Paris this morning: 

[53] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

REPUBLIQUE FRANgAISE 

CONSEIL MUNICIPAL DE PARIS 

HABITANTS DE PARIS 

Cest la Victoire, la Victoire triomphale; sur tous les 
fronts Vennemi vaincu a depose les armes, le sang va 
cesser de couler. 

Que Paris sorte de la fiere reserve qui lui a valu V ad- 
miration du monde. 

Let us give full course to our joy and our enthusiasm, 
and force back our tears. 

To bear witness of our infinite gratitude to our great 
Soldiers and their unconquerable Leaders, let us deco- 
rate all our houses with the French colors and those of 
our dear Allies. 

Our dead may sleep in peace: the sublime sacrifice 
that they have made of their lives to the future of the 
race, and the safety of the Patrie will not be sterile. 

For them, as for us, "the day of glory has come." 

LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC! 
LONG LIVE IMMORTAL FRANCE! 

To it Tom, the thoughtful sender, has appended 
aP.S.: 

"Long live immortal France." But don't regret your 
remoteness from the " day of glory." Paris is not nearly 
as grand as during those epic days and nights of en- 
durance just before Chateau-Thierry. I cannot see the 
end of the greatest war in the history of the world, and 
the greatest ordeal that France ever withstood, in the 
light of a football rally. I should like to talk to Cesar 
Franck to-night and hear him play stately, towering 
symphonies. Or to stand on the height, with Sainte 
Genevieve, very late, after the turmoil has subsided. 

[54] 



PAX IN BELLO 

Looking down, under a chill, unemotional, watchful 
moon, over Paris, city of cities, asleep. 

All very well for Tom to talk in this magnifi- 
cent vein. He is there, in the midst of the turmoil. 
If he really hates it so much, why did he not come 
out instead of sending a messenger? This is the 
first day since I reached the hospital — more than 
three weeks ago — that I have had no visitors. 
Natural. But depressing to be alone and detached 
on a day of collective emotion. . . . Tom is right, 
all the same, about the grandeur of the days of 
trial. They come back to me, one by one, scenes 
in a picture-show far more real, more immediate 
than the stifling peace of this night. 



The second day of the March offensive. The 
big gun has been aimed at the heart of France for 
twenty-four hours. Paris has already established 
an attitude — the attitude that bombardment is 
a thunder-shower, whose lightnings usually strike 
amiss. Crowds on the boulevards, taxis circu- 
lating, sad faces, tense faces, absent faces, but 
never a shadow of fear. 

B. B., hurrying from the Red Cross to lunch, 
stops to buy a paper from the old woman at the 
kiosk opposite the Madeleine. 

'^Bonjoufy madame. I haven't heard that 

[55 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

famous gun of yours for at least half an hour — 
have you?" 

''Que voulez-vous, monsieur? Faut quHl de- 
jeune! — It has to have its lunch." 



The Portuguese night nurse looks at me oddly. 
I must have laughed aloud. She thinks I am wan- 
dering. She was in town this afternoon, and still 
wears a dreamy look that matches a rose tucked 
in her belt. She tells me, with her shy smile, to rest, 
as she attaches the long rubber tube and turns 
the cock that sends a cold flood of Dakin solution 
through my bandages. Rest! Paris haunts me, too. 

I address questions, persistently, obstinately, 
to the dim blue-and-white figure moving about 
my room. Have they taken away the last oj the sand- 
bags that muffled the fountains and statues so deeply 
as the spring wore on? And the last of the decorative 
strips of paper that were supposed to save plate-glass 
windows from shock? (The rue de la Paix went 
in for diamond patterns, the Champs Elysees ran 
to cubism — even the toy-shop window on the 
rue Saint-Honore sported strange, geometrical 
beasts.) What has become of those delightful yellow 
balloons which rose into the pale sky after sunset? 
Their cords were to entangle the tails of the swoop- 

[56 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

ing German planes. One might think Paris were 
coquetting with war . , . but for the faces. 

Absent faces. The crash of the "Bertha" 
brought them back to the scene they were ignor- 
ing with a sort of quiver. Faces. What did you 
read on the faces to-night, Mademoiselle? 

No answer. She is gone. Only stillness, stifling 
me in its pale web. Those April nights, nights of 
the offensive, the stillness was even more profound 
than now. Even more stifling. A breathless hush 
that brought the battle close, close, close. 



Suddenly, corkscrewing into an unquiet dream, 
the siren. French guns. Another alerte. The 
cellar? Ca manque de charme, as the stolid cham- 
bermaid says. I will stay in bed. But the con- 
cierge is ruthless. He goes on ringing a huge bell 
that hangs just outside my window. He bangs at 
my door. The Swiss head waiter, shrieking, ''A 
la cave! a la cave!'' has turned out all the lights 
before I get downstairs, and dives before me into 
subterranean regions that date from an ancient 
convent. 

In the first cave the sports of the hotel are 

already uncorking champagne; in the second, a 

Spanish scene — a card-table with one flickering 

candle, a lady in black evening dress and three 

[57] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

swarthy, masculine faces; in the fourth, the 
cowards, maids and valets of every nationality 
gloomily whispering; in the last, brightly lighted 
with electricity, the beau monde. Trying to look 
as if it were their custom to spend the night en- 
tombed in a seven-foot vault lined with dusty 
bottles of old wine. 

Mr. Ford, of the American Red Cross, pro- 
tected by Mrs. Ford, has all his valuable papers 
under his Louis XV chair. He is making notes 
for his stenographer. The other males, though 
British officers, are less Olympian; in the tilt of 
their expressionless heads against the unyielding 
stone walls one divines a secret grievance: wives 
have decreed this ignominy. . . . The red-haired 
refugee from Russia, with her Bowery accent, her 
three-year-old boy and her sixteen-year-old French 
nurse, take up a great deal of room. So does Mrs. 
de Peyster's Russian wolf-hound. His mistress, 
with her pearls about her neck and her diamonds 
in her wristbag, summons M. le directeur to de- 
mand a carpet for the next occasion. Mrs. Thomp- 
son, in her green sweater, also finds it impossible 
to make her Chow comfortable. He has to yield 
his gilt chair to Miss Ames, who has slipped a fur 
coat over a gorgeous dressing-gown that belies 
her uniform hat. She has come from her canteen 
at the front — where they are bombed every 

[ 58 ] 



' PAX IN BELLO 

night — for a quiet night in Paris. The prettiest 
of last season's debutantes puts up with a pathetic 
Httle stool. 

Boom-m-m-m-m — 

''Oh, do you suppose that was the Grand 
Palais? I wish we could hear more, don't you? 
The only thing that I don't like about this cellar 
is that it muffles everything." 

'' Couchez, Chow! CoucJiez tout a fait! Mrs. de 
Peyster, do you mind keeping your dog the other 
side? Tout a fait, Chow! I am a little nervous — 
not about bombs. This is such a small room for 
a fight. I don't mean on your lap. We do love to 
treat them like children, don't we?" 

''How discouraging! I had heard to-day from 
somebody who really knows that things were 
better in Washington. Oh, no, my dear; it was a 
Major who told me. Well, anyhow. Baker is in 
this raid — I hope he heard that one. ..." 

"What does that waiter want, snooping 
around?" 

"They have sent him to see that we don't take 
any wine. Ten bottles disappeared last time." 

"John, John! Did you see where my husband 
went?" 

"Yes, they say it was a German General in 
British uniform who ordered them back. . . ." 

"Waiter, please go up and get me a glass — I 
[ 59 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

want some mineral water. You don't think I 
ought to ask him to go up? But you know as 
well as I do that man is a German spy — if any 
of his old bombs drop in our court. . . ." 

I steal out and climb the stairs. The sharp 
sound of the explosions is dying away. The 
French cannonading has stopped. Soon the ber- 
loque will announce the end. I stick my head out 
of my high window. Utter blackness, blackness 
that denies the very possibility of light. Yet 
through it, on the street below, is already travel- 
ling something warm and vibrant and human: the 
Paris crowd. It is as if a river, obstructed for a 
moment, had found its normal course again. The 
murmur is slightly subdued, confused, but eddies 
of easy laughter, voices disputing as to where the 
last bomb fell, float up to me. Here come the 
bells — blessed bells, sober bells. Nobody who 
has not heard them tolling peace, tolling sleep, 
through the solemn nights, knows the fortitude 
of the soul of France. 



Not a bell, to-night. I will call the little nurse 
and ask her what Victory has done to the soul of 
France, that Neuilly broods over it so glumly. 
No. She would not understand. I must just keep 
on remembering, and remembering. 
[60 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

June . . . The shadow of a new sound haunts the 
silent small hours. Something like a heart-beat, 
a heart-beat of the night itself, or like a breath, a 
sighing breath, shaking me in my bed. (So, dur- 
ing the Marne, they say, could Paris hear the 
guns of the front.) 

In this breath American guns at last have their 
share. Travelling through the darkness toward 
Neuilly in our ambulances come our young vet- 
erans, armless, eyeless, choking with gas and 
blood, exactly as the veterans of Mons and Ver- 
dun have come before them. . . . The sound grad- 
ually ebbs away. A crack of daylight — I open 
my curtain. The gargon de cafe opposite has 
paused in his white-aproned rolling-up of iron 
shutters to read the Matin, A working-girl passes 
with her nose in a paper. Next an old gentleman 
in grey spats, and an American private — both 
lost in the news. *' Better or worse?" How can I 
help shrieking down from my fifth floor: **Is it 
worse or better?" 

'' Plutot mieuXy'' answers Charles, bringing my 
roll and jam. "We have counter-attacked." What 
right have I to rolls and jam? 
* * * 

Never was such intense and exquisite weather. 
The air is gold and light, the sky brilliantly soft 

[ 6i ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

and blue, the sun burning hot on the wooden 
pavements, the shadow of the grey arcades along 
the rue de Rivoli cool as crystal. The grey-green 
spring with its delicate yellow flowers has turned 
into glowing summer. Red roses on midinettes* 
breasts to tempt the American soldier; red roses 
at the street corners, red strawberries and cherries 
on pushcarts. Women with carmine lips buying 
pink collars at the stalls outside the Galeries and 
foolish little dolls to charm off the Gothas — 
N6nette and Rintintin. Red taxis laden to the 
roof with luggage; Red Cross flags, Red Cross 
uniforms. Red Cross trucks. Outside the head- 
quarters the latter stand in rows — full of pack- 
ing-cases, full of nurses; as doctors distribute gas- 
masks, the truck drivers read Paris-Midi, Are 
they any nearer? Again every passer-by is lost in 
a journal. Even the privates of the Signal Corps, 
playing baseball in the noon hour in the Tuileries 
Gardens, stop sometimes to take a look at The 
Stars and Stripes. The demoiselles de magasin, 
sitting on spidery iron chairs and eating their 
lunch out of paper packages, comment admiringly 
on these broad-shouldered sweethearts, who oc- 
casionally dart up to proffer a greeting in argot. 
''Pretty much at home," says Bob, just back 
from the front, as he leads the way toward the 
best restaurant on the Champs Elysees. 

[ 62 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

Yes, we Americans are pretty much at home in 
Paris now. We have a right here. There is no 
condescension in the accent of the mattre d'hotel 
at the Restaurant des Ambassadeurs. 

''Melon, sir? Sturgeon, sir? — one only gets 
it two or three times a year, sir." 

Bob orders melon, sturgeon, and champagne. 
Outside the hedge that shelters this perfection, 
the chestnut trees and the benches, where fluffy 
children used to watch Mr. Punch and lovely 
ladies used to preen their parasols, are sprayed 
with dust from heavy military camions. The 
young persons who sit on the benches now are 
tawdry, the babies who play about are grimy 
little refugees. From the windows of hotels and 
great houses loom the bandaged heads of the 
wounded. Luckily, Bob does not look through the 
green barrier. He carried one of his men three 
miles on his back yesterday — but he does not 
tell me that. He gazes blissfully at the spotless 
cloth, at the red roses and red awnings, and he 
yields up his hundred francs with a murmur of 
praise for the arts of Paris. But just as we start 
a woman thrusts La Liberie through the hedge. 
The Marines are attacking. . . . 

Vlntransigeanty La Liberie — another raucous, 
breathless newspaper hour, the hour of the after- 
noon communique. The people on the boulevards 
[63 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

walk like inchworms, digesting a paragraph with 
every inch. Nobody speaks — they have ad- 
vanced a little. . . . 

Night is here again. Or rather the long, 
blooming summer twilight that lasts till half-past 
ten. Over the strident sounds and colors and anx- 
ieties of the day it drops like balm, drops from a 
soft grey sky shot with rose and yellow, bathing 
the Seine and its springing bridges, brooding over 
the nobly massed roof-line of the Louvre, gloom- 
ing on the gardens, where sculptured trees and 
tender nudes blend their genres in a rapt dream 
of beauty. In the dream, sharing it, walk France 
and America — together, and not alien. Yet 
there is a private standing alone. What does he 
see? A stone basin, an obelisk, an arch with a 
sharp sliver of new moon above it. Arizona tak- 
ing the measure of Napoleon ! Can Arizona save 
Paris? Must these lovely stones — fragile as 
Venetian glass they look to our eyes to-night — 
be sacrificed in the process? 

"If need be," says Tom, who sits on the 
bench beside me, staring at the empty spaces in 
the fading light. Taking account of the incisive 
meaning of Paris in French and world psychology. 
He has lived with the Germans in Brussels — he 
knows what it would be to see them here. What 

[64] 



PAX IN BELLO 

does this new brand of young American not know 
about Europe — many things, certainly, that 
Henry James and Whistler never learned through 
years of eager application. More "European- 
ized," though they don't realize it, than the self- 
conscious ''Europeanized" of the old days, who 
cultivated sophistication and a French accent at 
the Beaux-Arts. The new type has a right to 
speak of the destinies of Europe. Paris must not 
he taken. 

Darkness falls. The long vista to the Arc de 
Triomphe is pricked with peacock green and 
orange — the stage is set for a raid. In another 
half-hour the heavens will be alive with light 
and the shrubberies cracking with shrapnel. The 
translucent screen of beauty that has interposed 
itself for an hour between us and the front again 
turns plate glass. Out of the night comes the 
voice of a French interpreter talking with an 
American friend: ** Peace? Buy an inglorious 
peace with Paris — can Germany believe it? 
Athens was destroyed, Florence was devastated 
by the Spaniards and her beautiful ring of encir- 
cling villas razed to the ground. History repeats 
itself. We should have no joy in our houses, in 
our Louvre, in our Notre Dame if to save them 
we had to consent to peace. But how we shall 
love them, Colonel — or what remains of them — 
[65 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

if a noble battle waged by your troops and ours 
together saves them for us. . . ." 



The Portuguese night-nurse is bending over me 
again with the same shy, troubled smile. *' Your 
hypo." — thank Heaven! This effort to recon- 
struct the past keeps my heart going too fast. 
My American friends — will not Sainte Gene- 
vieve include them in her protective meditation 
to-night, up there on her blue height? Ameri- 
cans who have become bone of the bone of Eu- 
rope, through sharing so intimately in her agony. 
Men and women both, they have a stake here 
now. Few of them will be able to go back to 
their old lives on the old terms. 

Queer. I can't remember their names. I can't 
see their faces. I am floating out into a region 
where only shadows exist. Misty and dark. 

Sounds. I hear something at last. A horn. 
A taxi horn. And louder, vaguer, denser echoes 
— • like the roar of New York. The celebration is 
reaching Neuilly. No. It must be the universe, 
roaring in my ears. A universe freed from the 
bonds of war. Whirling madly in the dark. But 
there was the moon, distilling peace and security 
in our garden. Stiffly I turn my head. She is gone. 
In the garden, too, only the whirling dark. . . . 
f 66 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

November 12 
A WONDERFUL sunny morning. Miss O. wears a 
white uniform by way of celebration — instead 
of the ugly grey one the Red Cross invented for 
its foreign service — and fresh, and pink, and 
happy it makes her look. (There must have been 
a letter from her North Dakota ''man" last 
night.) She opens the French window wide upon 
the garden while I eat my breakfast, and lets 
''Saint Martin's summer" in. Just outside a very 
pretty tableau: some of the wounded boys stole 
a captured trench-mortar from the place de la 
Concorde and dragged it all the way to ''Nooly" 
in the small hours. Now they are painting it, 
with a grandly possessive air, while French and 
American flags are collected for a procession. 

Morning is the easiest and most normal time 
in a hospital bed. Because the busiest. The num- 
ber of commonplace duties to be got through 
gives an illusion of useful living. Everything is 
an event: having one's temperature taken, having 
one's wounds irrigated; sponge-bath, fresh linen 
(luxuries I fully appreciate after the French tent), 
two minutes with Miss G., the assistant head- 
nurse, whose skin is always creamy, whose blue 
eyes are always jolly, however early she makes 
her rounds. Even the femme de mmage is an 
event. 

[ 67 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

When the whistles and bells began to announce 
the signing, at eleven o'clock yesterday morning, 
the femme de menage was on her knees scrubbing 
my floor. Sharply she lifted her broad, brown, 
peasant face. Pushed back her straggling grey 
hair with two dripping red hands. Then leaned 
her great bare arms on the rim of her pail. 
Rested there, looking toward my pillow, an ex- 
pression of slow and poignant beatitude spread- 
ing over her seamed cheeks, till even the deep-set 
corners of her eyes and lips were trembling with it. 

*'Cesi la paix, madame . » . mon gargon , . . 
sauve. ..." 

Two tears rolled down into the pail. 

'' Cest la joie. Depuis si longtemps qu'on a eti 
ferme ..." 

It is so long that we have been closed. Yes. . . . 
Suddenly our hearts are wide open. Full of some- 
thing bright to incandescence — the flame of all 
the lives that will no longer be snuffed out. Mont- 
Notre-Dame . . . Rick . . . Stewart. ... It must 
be that those boys are safe. It must be. 

Still the robust old woman leaned her arms and 
her heavy breast against the pail, looking at the 
American propped on her pillows. 

"But the war isn't ended for Madame. Nor 
for all those poor soldiers who, like Madame, were 

f 68 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

wounded toward the last. (They won't get the 
same care that the others did. In the tramways 
already people don't get up to give the mutiles 
their seats.) Nor for me, the war is n't over. 
No ... I lost my other son at the Chemin des 
Dames. The twin of this one. Cleverer, he was. 
And the cost of living going up. Hm . . . oui . . . 
oui. . . . Cest comme qa, leur maudite guerre,'* 

The last phrase rolled up from the voluminous 
depths of her skirts in the rich, lusty voice that 
adds Voltairian commentary to her morning's 
scrubbings. She had found her normal self again. 
And her normal quarrel with society. Leur 
maudiie guerre. ''Theirs," not ''ours." Theirs, 
the government, the bourgeois, the rich. We 
fought it, her tone implied, because we must, and 
because indeed we could n't have the Boches 
marching in. But we are realists. We demand 
now, why you, you the rich and powerful and 
intelligent, did not find some less disastrous 
method of saving us and yourselves? 

Against me Madame Mangin (no relation of 
the general, she wishes me to know) bears no 
grudge. I have suffered. And Miss O. and I do 
not treat her just as an obstruction to the floor. 

"Mademoiselle is good," she says to me every 
day of my nurse, and would teach her French in 
return for this human decency if Miss O. were 
[69] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

not too shy to venture a word. Madame Mangin 
is Miss O.'s first experience of class distinction 
and class degradation. On her self-respecting 
North Dakota farm to scrub was part of the day's 
work. She is profoundly shocked by the subjec- 
tion of this generic French army in patched blue 
gingham, which steals into the hospital at 7 a.m. 
and glides over every inch of the floor space on 
meek knees before noon — pushing its pails out 
of the way of the scornful white shoes of the 
nurses, and the cursing military boots of the 
medical staff. 

Madame Mangin is very conversational this 
morning as she swabs my linoleum. Recounts 
how she and her daughter — an old maid, more's 
the pity — celebrated the Armistice with cousins 
near the Bastille. Whispers that the Monsieur in 
the next room is "more rich than poor. He has 
a rug. And an open fire!" Laments that butter 
is getting scarce. Fears that her son will have 
difficulty in finding a job. Her son has, neverthe- 
less, had advantages. For lack of them she has 
had to do hard manual work all her life. An 
orphan, she was. Brought up on a farm by public 
charity. Placed in service. Married to a day 
laborer, who became paralyzed and was fifteen 
years in dying. A year after his death her two 
sons are taken by the army. One returns . . . 

[70] 



PAX IN BELLO 

"What does Victory mean to me, Madame?" 

"Monsieur and Madame A. S., " announces 
Miss O. 

Th^femme de menage reverts to type, slops her 
way humbly out of the door, as the visitors come 
in. They are delighted with the childish tableau 
of the doughboys and their trench-mortar. Ma- 
dame has brought fruit and jelly for the invalid. 
And it is characteristic of the poet's sympathetic 
kindness to be the first — before any American 
friend, as it happens — to cheer me with a de- 
scription of Armistice Day. His blue eyes are 
like a summer river, reflecting one delicious im- 
age after another. This writer of the grey-gold 
beard and the subtle intelligence loves to brush 
elbows with his humblest fellows, to smell their 
dirt and sweat, savor their racy jokes. '' Je suis 
tres, tres populaire, vous savez, tres democrate, very 
much of the people." And yesterday! All his dis-^ 
illusions about the war were swamped by the great 
wave of joy that overwhelmed the Paris streets. 

What a sense he gave me of the beloved city 
suddenly translated from its drab war-sadness; 
suddenly all brilliant flags, white armistice stream- 
ers, embracing people, variegated soldiers and 
processions — especially processions which formed 
in one kaleidoscopic pattern, dissolved, formed 
in another pattern. From every grey street and 

[71 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

square, they emerged, spontaneously generated; 
French school-boys in long, singing columns, 
dragging enormous guns after them. American 
and British soldiers in huge motor trucks, 
workmen in blouses, employees of the '* Samar- 
itaine" or the ''Bon March6," with banners; 
housewives; refugee children in uniform guarded 
by Sisters of Charity. A. S. used an expression 
similar to Madame Mangln's — something about 
a closed vessel suddenly opened to sun and air 
and happiness. Absolutely natural and right, 
he thinks, the demonstration, and adequate be- 
cause it gushed up from the tired and sad old 
town like a fountain of new life. 

His great interest after processions was in in- 
dividuals. He and Madame S., who was sustaining 
his enthusiasm like the good French wife she is, 
kept interrupting each other to describe this or 
that person: 

"Do you remember the old concierge . . .'* 

"... Who had certainly never emerged from 
her lodge since 1870, as she wore. Mademoiselle, 
exactly the clothes of the period ..." 

" . . . She was leading a group of school-children 
— that was the queer part — hobbling ahead of 
them, beating her crooked old arms to make them 
sing the Marseillaise: *Allez, chantez la repub- 
liquet '' 

[72] 



PAX IN BELLO 

**And the washerwoman, with a basket on her 
arm, who said to A. on a street-corner: 'Every- 
body is happy — I, too, am happy for the patrie. 
Yet I remain all alone.'" 

"And the one-legged mutile who stumped ahead 
of three or four rows of wheeled chairs pushed 
by Red Cross nurses, calling: 'Make way for the 
embusquesf* 

"Yes, Mademoiselle. And they were singing, 
those poor fellows, in chorus : 

** Mourir pour la patrie^ 
Cest le sort le plus beau.'^ 

"The crowd was absolutely silent as they 
passed. Suddenly a woman in black rushed for- 
ward holding out both arms — but before she 
reached the first muHlS, she stopped with a ges- 
ture I shall never forget and took off her hat. Then, 
holding it clasped to her breast, she walked down 
the line kissing each man on both cheeks." 

"Beautiful," said the poet, wiping his eyes. 

Wi ^ ^ 

Later 

A STRING of callers. As I lie here alone I wait 
impatiently for their coming. But as soon as my 
grey room and my quiet are invaded I long to be 
again remote. Remote and immobile on my high 
bed. Not obliged to move even a muscle — or a 
[73l 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

lip. Like a mediaeval lady carved on a stone tomb. 
Such a lady — with her hair in two braids over 
her ears — must have fretted when she heard 
the French Revolution raging outside her dusky 
cathedral nave. Yet when the stained glass was 
shattered, and voices poured in on rifts of light, 
she, too, would have cringed . . . 

For instance : at the sound of the peace bells the 
American Red Cross thronged to the place de la 
Concorde. There, while French mothers — how 
many thousands of them — were praying, it ex- 
ecuted a snake-dance, under the leadership of 
some of its most famous *' majors." This was re- 
ported by Mary, with no arriere-pensee as to the 
suitability of serpentining, as she removed laun- 
dry and jam for my comfort from her flowered 
bag. I don't know what I should do without this 
gently cheerful little visitor who came, as usual, 
in her lunch-hour, with her blue veil and cape over 
her nurse's aide's uniform. Then hurried back to 
her ward: heavy convoys of American wounded 
have been arriving since last night at the Am- 
bulance. Terrible, inconceivable as it seems, one 
of our divisions in the Argonne attacked yesterday 
morning . . . 

The psychology of these gentle, passionate, 
well-bred, brown-haired American spinsters who, 
after two or three years of nursing — nursing gas 
[74] 



PAX IN BELLO 

and wounds, in hospitals sometimes bombed and 
shelled — yet take pleasure in the street celebra- 
tion, amazes me. Elizabeth, my second visitor of 
the species, was glorying besides in the harshness 
of the Armistice terms. As I think it over, she, 
who nursed largely in Belgium, is the only hater 
• — not excepting the French pupil nurses — I 
have seen. The only person thinking about Ger- 
many's humiliation as the reverse of our triumph. 
S.'s joy in the streets was not that: it was joy 
in the world's — especially the French common 
people's — liberation. 

Tom, who appeared next with Vernon Kellogg, 
had felt no joy at all, but was bent on amusing. 
As by the story of the French soldier who was 
tearing along so full of enthusiasm that he in- 
advertently collided with a horse. And, nothing 
daunted, clasped the animal fervently, shouting: 
** Vivent les chevaux!'* 

I suppose I laughed now and then. Though 
what I was chiefly aware of was the niceness of 
these two busy Hooverites journeying out here 
to provide eyes for the hlessee, Tom looking 
distracted — the Food Administration plus the 
C.R.B. drive him hard. Pale, too. When I first 
knew him, last year, in the Red Cross, he was 
rosy enough to live up to his college nickname. 
And had a childlike and disarming smile. The 
[75] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

bureaucrats of French food are doing their best 
to make him look like a worried old man. As for 
V. K. — who also belongs to the Napoleon-race, 
for stature, and is surely something of a genius — 
he, too, is flogging his energies with his nerves. 

Well — interesting to note that every nation 
reports its own people — the Americans made 
the town hot. Seized taxi-cabs, put abri signs on 
them, piled inside and on the roof, and drove down 
the boulevards blowing horns and shooting off 
revolvers, to the amazement, if not the disgust, 
of the natives. Took complete possession of the 
Cafe de Paris, threw out first the waiters, then 
the gendarmes, rifled the cave, kept on the lights 
and guzzled till two in the morning. Tom had an 
encounter with one drunken Captain who asked 
him to buy for him (as he *' did n't speak the 
d — frog-language") an American flag from a 
passing taxi-driver. The French chauffeur re- 
fused to sell. The Captain offered fifty francs. 
No, not at any price. The Captain insisted, with 
fury, that an "American officer" must naturally 
have a prior right to "his own flag." And when 
Tom said he certainly could n't buy this one, 
roared out: "I believe you're nothing but a d^ — 
frog yourself ! " 

Of course, our compatriots went in strong for 
midinettes, Tom said one of his finest impressions 

[76] 



PAX IN BELLO 

was in a side-street off the boulevard des Capu- 
cines, where a triumphant voice issued from the 
dark: '*I got a giri, 'Erb, come on!" And a 
friend of his achieved success by addressing ev- 
ery good-looking lady in best American-French : 
''Mademoiselle, la guerre n'est pas encore finieJ' 
'' Comment, pas encore finie ? " '' Non, il faut don- 
ner un dernier coup'' — whereupon an embrace! 
The celebration, they explained, was very lim- 
ited in area, limited almost to the boulevards. 
To drive down the Champs Elys6es and the rue 
de Rivoli was to feel on the outward fringe — • 
close enough to get the throb and thrill, yet 
apart. The centre of the thrill was the place de 
rOpera which, viewed from a tall building near 
by, "was like a great swarm of far-off people en- 
gaged in some gigantic demonstration" which 
attained dignity and even mystic grandeur in 
the blue afternoon mist. 

Dr. Kellogg reports that his wife has started 
for Lille and Belgium. (To think — I might 
have been with her.) He is off to Poland. I 
wonder if this professor of biology will ever go 
back to his laboratory? Far afield he has wan- 
dered. And Tom — who hopes Hoover will soon 
liberate him from Paris for something more ad- 
venturous — what is to become of him? If he had 
not gone to Belgium from his college sociology, 
[77] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

he might take his place as a "young Radical'' in 
the office of some New York journal. But now — 
how can he use his thoroughly aroused will-to- 
power and his first-hand knowledge of the inner 
springs and devious routes of European econom- 
ics? 

* * ♦ 

All the visitors gone, at last. Queer to call up 
the reflection of the Armistice celebration in their 
varying temperaments, as the grey dusk thickens, 
and the black fog of my pain. Take Tom's re- 
action. He hated the festivities. They offended 
his artistic sense. Tarnished the greatness of the 
hour. Only perfect silence could have satisfied 
him. But, humanly speaking, he thought it en- 
tirely decent for the A.E.F. to yell and get drunk, 
and indulge its appetites. While Major E., of the 
American Friends' Unit, suffered the most in- 
tense shame to see American officers chinning 
themselves on the gold chandeliers of the Caf6 
de Paris. Swilling champagne, running so much 
more amuck than the other Allied officers "who 
had suffered so much more in the war." Major E. 
saw I was sailing into a dusky region. Set down 
his big basket of hothouse fruit with quiet sym- 
pathy. If not so roused would have liked to tell 
me pretty stories — one about a sailor boy in the 
rue de la Paix who fell out of his procession and 
[ 78 1 



FAX IN BELLO 

"shinnied" up a fluted column to Paquin's bal- 
cony, to get a kiss in return for a rose. Midi- 
nettes? There this very unmajorly major fal- 
tered, almost blushed. New experience in his 
sober life to kiss his way out of a circle of laugh- 
ing, painted girls. ''Garden of Eden conditions,'* 
he apologized — "not at all what it would seem 
at home ..." 

As for Walter Lippmann, who turned up with a 
cloudy look last of all, probably he did not even 
see the street-scenes. What he saw was Presi- 
dent Wilson's face, thrown on a screen above the 
great crowd in the place de I'Opera. A face 
greeted with enormous emotion — cheered far 
beyond those of Clemenceau and Lloyd George — 
by a crowd preponderantly French. The severity 
of the Armistice terms is dire for Germany, W. L. 
believes. Still more so for the Allies. He had been 
reading Gauvain in the Journal des Dehats, who 
significantly points out, to-night, that the Armi- 
stice ''makes no allusion to the Fourteen Points"; 
and that the President's peace programme is 
purely theoretical, "must now be developed in 
conformity with circumstances." If this is the 
tone of a very liberal authority, Wilson must 
surely come to France. 

* * * 

No use. The pain detaches me from politics. 
[79] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

From my bed. Hurls me out into feverish space 
with a queer sense of home-coming. I seem to 
belong in this vague sphere. Subconsciously I 
wait for it, long for it. That is why I am so im- 
patient when I have to fix my attention on day- 
light commonplaces. Why I find it so difficult 
to talk — and listen. In this dimmer region is 
truth, glimmering. Always eluding me. But 
glimmering ahead. 

To-night I see faces. Rick*s face. Long and thin 
and black under the eyes — as it gets when he 
is thinking instead of flying. He believes the 
great crisis of his life is behind him. Believes he 
has drawn a blank. Is amazed to contemplate 
the fact of mere existence. Poor boy. I wish he 
would send me a telegram. But an intuition will 
be all I have to go on till some day he saunters 
in. . . . 

Ernest: he will have been drinking to victory 
in some tapestry-hung salon of the noblesse of 
Dijon. And when he gets back to his humble 
billet he will pause, as he begins to remove his 
huge military boots — wrinkling his nose char- 
acteristically — to wonder what he is to do and 
what Katharine and Nancy are to do with the 
series of aesthetic and leisurely reactions on life, 
the taste for old wines and rare etchings, the love 
of the French humanities, the French tongue, and 
[80] 



PAX IN BELLO 

the French race that he has suddenly substituted 
for the hard drive of a law office in a rather barren 
Middle- Western city. 

And Lucinda: Her delicate, dark face and 
great brown eyes — so much more lovely and 
tender than when I first knew her a year ago — 
are bending over her wounded privates at Dr. 
Blake's. Convoy after convoy pouring in. . . . 
(When will she come to see me?) She has dis- 
covered her heart and her energy for the first 
time, in nursing. Can she go back to a conven- 
tional New York life? 

Gertrude: in a Y.M.C.A. hut crammed to the 
roof with the First Division, making a tremendous 
speech about peace. Eager listening soldiers who 
drink up her vitality and her unselfish ardor. The 
sort of understanding of variously average Ameri- 
can men that she has acquired — what will she 
do with it now? And how will she do without 
their enormous reliance upon her, their need of 
her ultimate power of giving? 

What is to become of all of us? We might have 
been in a closed sack for four years. A giant hand 
has unloosed the string that binds it. Tossed us 
free into space where we sprawl and kick and 
choke, because we have so much air to breathe. 
Surprised, aghast. Michelangelo should be here 
to paint us in these catastrophic attitudes, 
f 8i 1 



SHADOW'SHAPES 

November i6 
A FRESH, clear, snappy morning. Almost like 
New England. The Red Cross nurses, passing 
my window early on the way to duty in the tents, 
huddle under their blue capes lined with red. The 
**boys" limp by to breakfast more briskly than 
usual. An aroma of American bacon makes me 
homesick for my journeys up and down the A.E.F. 
No more swift, cold drives in khaki-colored 
cars. No more marvellous American growths 
springing from the ancient French countryside. 
Impossible to realize that the Armistice guns have 
shattered the A.E.F. into bits. It had come to 
seem imperishable, a living creation. Yet the mil- 
lions of men who made it live will soon be spread 
wide over the vast surface of the United States. 
Lost again in our grinding industrial cities, our 
tin-roofed Western farms, our barren New Eng- 
land villages. I am forever asking myself what 
traces they will keep of their contact with Europe. 
They will all be marked, in one way or another. A 
good many will be lightly powdered with French 
earth. But only a few will find roots clinging to 
them ; roots that will shrivel or weep a European 
sap when inserted into the soil of Indiana or Maine. 

Maine — wasn't that where the first body of 
American soldiers I ever saw in France hailed 
[82] 



PAX IN BELLO 

from? The ones I happened upon in a lean, brown, 
pastoral country that might itself have been 
Maine. I had just come from Verdun; from the 
still beleaguered citadel, from a land sternly or- 
ganized and scarred by war, and swarming with 
seasoned French troops. Then all at once here 
was the A.E.F. The first squad was drawn up for 
drill in a poor little peaceful, brown-tiled village. 
Service hats, that made them somehow look like 
Pilgrim Fathers, set squarely above red cheeks. 
Next, with unaccustomed helmets sliding at a 
rakish, almost a girlish angle, came a machine-gun 
company convoying one lone machine gun along 
a wood road. In the willowy valleys, and on the 
piney hillside, sparse groups of infantry. Could 
anything so innocent and unequipped as this 
trans-Atlantic force of ours ever become an army 
trained to the IQ18 arena? 

Ships landed without docks. Warehouses built 
without wood. Stores transported without cars — 
one learned of the fibre of America in a journey 
from the Base ports to the Lorraine front! Caro- 
lina stevedores singing at their unloading in the 
crowded harbor of Saint-Nazaire. Negroes build- 
ing railroad tracks (I saw three in Civil War 
uniforms) in sandy central France. Boys from 
Pennsylvania shunting freight cars — "Say, you 
have to talk to this engine in French, or she won't 
[83 1 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

go ! *' East Side Jews and Italians building depots. 
Foresters from the Pacific cutting and sawing for 
the Italians. Southern engineers building bridges. 
Cowboys from Colorado tying their mules in 
turreted French villages. Men from Minnesota 
sitting up in hospital cots ** Northwest of Toul " to 
describe in German-American the Boches they 
had done for. 

And then those masses of khaki I walked into 
by the Madeleine one listless July night when hope 
was low. A line of motor-trucks extending as far 
down the dingy, deserted boulevard as the eye 
could reach, loaded with American guns, Ameri- 
can supplies, American soldiers. Inexhaustible 
resources, inexhaustible vitality ! Tears rise to the 
eyes of the quiet French population that gathers 
quickly out of the twilight. The American boys 
have such jolly, comical faces, so burned and 
ruddy, so black with dust, and with roses stuck in 
their hats and their rifles. 

** At any moment may descend hot death 
To shatter limbs! Pulp, tear, blast 
Beloved soldiers who love rough life and breath 
Not less for dying faithful to the last." 

Beloved soldiers, beloved Americains. Glasses and 
bottles are whisked out of cafes. Pretty little 
street girls swarming like bees, offering roses and 
kisses, charming in the sense they have — yes, 
[84] 



PAX IN BELLO 

they, too, have fine French feelings, these little 
girls— -of the fine young American faith offered 
to save France. ''Les chers enfants, les braves, 
qu'ils viennent de loin'' — yes, we were the only 
child-hearted people left in this racked and dis- 
illusioned Europe last July and we came from 
far, far " to tell the world." That was our greatest 
contribution to the Allied cause. We are young 
yet after the Argonne and the Armistice, and now 
we are going far, far back again. . . . 

** Those poor boys think theyVe going to get 
home for Christmas," says Miss O. from the win- 
dow. *'I just wish they could — they 're more 
restless already." 

It's true. There is something in the faces even 
of this small circle of wounded survivors, still 
dressed in unified olive-drab, still moved by group 
emotion, reading Pershing's "Victory order" in 
the Herald, that shows a relaxation of the patient 
common purpose of the A.E.F. A new sort of 
discontent. The next months will in certain ways 
be harder than the war, more of a strain on morale. 
Pershing does well to sound a warning as to the 
dangers of victory. Petain sounded it first. His 
order is the finer, for the French tongue lends it- 
self to the expression of high emotion: 

History will celebrate the tenacity and the proud 
[85] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

energy spent during these four years by our country 
which had to conquer in order not to die. . . . You will 
not reply to the crimes which have been committed by 
a violence that might in the excess of your resentment 
seem legitimate. . . . Having conquered your adver- 
sary by force of arms you will further dominate him 
by the dignity of your attitude; and the world will not 
know which to admire more, your bearing in success or 
your heroism in combat. . . . 

I wish Petain had not used the word "crimes." 
Why not, since crimes there were? Perhaps one 
wants the Allies too magnanimous to underline 
their magnanimity. Perhaps, when one has seen 
war at close quarters, words of civil justice lose 
their meaning. I was still pondering these ques- 
tions, this afternoon, when Miss O. brought in 
a quasi-official French visitor — who, as it hap- 
pens, had talked to me a great deal in the past 
about German "crimes." Madame S., with whom 
last year, when she was acting as press guide for 
the French Government in the war zone, I jour- 
neyed to Alsace and Verdun. She was eminently 
fitted for the job from the official standpoint: well 
born and bred (the daughter of a distinguished 
Academician and novelist), flexible in talk, agree- 
able to travel with. Convinced of the necessity of 
spreading certain types of French ideas, yet hand- 
ing them out in such homoeopathic doses that most 
of the foreign ladies swallowed them quite unsus- 
[86] 



PAX IN BELLO 

pecting. Slim and smart enough, too, and quite 
hard-headed enough to make a soft, feminine 
charm, rather than a masculine grip, her stock- 
in-trade — especially with the French Army. No 
sinecure to persuade an officier de carriere to be 
receptive to American women journalists! I have 
a genuine sympathie for her, and she one for me, I 
believe, though she mistrusts my New Republic- 
anism as I mistrust her Catholic conservatism 
and her undefined, but very definite, foothold in 
the inner temple of French diplomacy. 

She came to-day to inquire for my wounds 
in the interest of the Quai d'Orsay. By the 
time she had praised my roses, and astutely crit- 
icised my chrysanthemums — a bunch of gor- 
geous hothouse blooms — for their "coldness," 
she had taken it in that I was accepting the for- 
tunes of war without thought of blame. Where- 
upon she plunged into politics. 

To Madame S. November nth equals tri- 
umph over Germany. On les al It sparkled in 
her black eyes (eyes quite wickedly pretty even 
on ordinary days), gave her pencilled lips a special 
curve of vindictiveness, added verve to her delicate, 
bird-like gestures. The Armistice terms, she 
thinks, are duly hard. She is by no means con- 
vinced that France should not extend her bound- 
aries to the left bank of the Rhine. M. Berthelot 
[87] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

is drawing up the statement of France*s claims, 
and he can be trusted. Germany is defeated : surely 
it is legitimate and natural that this stupen- 
dous fact should dominate the French intelligence 
just now. Yet there was something ominous about 
Madame S.'s exultation, as she spoke of the 
Rhine, the flight of the Crown Prince to Holland, 
the abdication of Charles of Austria. Not the joy 
of a democrat in the democratic future of Europe. 
President Wilson's probable coming she mentioned 
with a certain reserve — the tone of the Debats 
and the Temps as contrasted with the frank joy 
of VHumanite, But she believed that once he had 
visited the devastated regions he could not fail to 
realize . . . 

She, too, had been in the Paris streets on the 
day of the Armistice: 

''I found myself in the crowd between two 
wounded officers. Chasseurs Alpins they were. 
One of them, a Captain, had such an attractive 
face that I asked him if he were feeling happy. 
* Yes, weVe glad of victory. But what grieves us, 
my friend and me, is not to have been able to stay 
at the front to the end. Only a month ago that we 
were wounded. No luck!'" 

Then she told the story of a marquis, the owner 
of a great estate north of Verdun, who arrived 
there in his officer's uniform on November nth 
[88 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

before the Germans had gone, to the alarm of 
the tenants: 

*^ Attention, M. le marquis, les Boches sont W 
"Don't worry, my good friends" — and he re- 
tired triumphantly to sleep in his dog kennels, 
leaving the Germans in his house for a last un- 
happy night. 

Chasseurs Alpins and marquises: a very differ- 
ent France, hers, from that of the poet's repub- 
lican vignettes. Madame S. paints her country 
much as the charming French officers who came 
to America in the spring of 191 7 represented her 
to us, in a glamour of horizon blue. I shall always 
have a weakness for horizon blue. But I can't 
be too thankful that I never wrote, under Ma- 
dame S.'s guidance, the sort of propagandist 
article approved by the ''Affaires Etrang^res." 
In her heart she respects me for not having done 
it, though she regards ''propaganda" as entirely 
legitimate. 

Propaganda! — whether German, British, 
French, or American, it appears to me a giant 
bugbear, sitting hard on the chest of the world. 
I am so depressed by a glance at the censored 
evening papers after Madame's departure that 
my nurse suggests a chapter from Willa Gather's 
new novel, "My Antonia." She loves the book 
herself, for it takes her back to the farm, and the 
I 89] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

villages she drives to over the treeless, windy 
roads of North Dakota. And I, through the magic 
of these very simple words, lose myself, too, in 
blond corn-fields; in miles of copper-red grass 
drowned in fierce sunlight; in a free, frank, grassy 
country which, as the author says, "seems to 
be running." ... I see it ''running" from the 
Franco-American spells evolved by the complex 
brains of the rue Frangois P^. 

How inaccessible to such spells — if the com- 
plex brains only knew — are Americans like this 
placid girl sitting beside me. (Thousands of 
American soldiers of her species.) She descends 
from the blond, isolated corn-fields as I descend 
from nubbly New England pastures overlooking 
the sea — the sea that washes Europe. The sea 
that keeps the tongues of Latin Europe haunting 
in my ears, and throws a mirage of its storied 
cities before my eyes. Nothing in Miss O. washes, 
reflects Europe; at least Latin Europe. If she 
strikes a self-respecting course through the dark 
mysteries of Neuilly, that is due to sheer charac- 
ter. Such character as her Norwegian father 
showed in guiding his prairie-schooner into the 
Dakotan wilds. Duty is her guiding-star — duty 
to me whom she admirably accepts as "her pa- 
tient," though she made a real sacrifice to come 
across plain and ocean to France to nurse wounded 
[90] 



PAX IN BELLO 

soldiers. I have ever so many more points of 
contact with the Httle French nurses who do 
things for me during her hours "off" — yet, have 
I? It rests me enormously just now to see her 
sitting there, cosily, in her ugly grey sweater. As 
impermeable to the subtleties of my late visitor 
as one of those nice, friendly prairie-dogs, be- 
loved of Antonia. 

* * * 

Always the vibration between wanting visitors 
to give me vicarious life and knowledge again, and 
hating them because they hurt my still peace. 
Each new figure in the pattern of my days tinkles 
sharply against my silence and my pain — as a 
bit of colored glass drops into its place in a 
kaleidoscope. But by evening suffering and pat- 
tern merge. And I am fused with both. 

Sunday, November 17 
French gentlemen have got out their high hats 
to-day for the first time since 1914. In honor of 
the first "official" celebration of Victory. An 
Alsace-Lorraine procession down the Champs 
Elysees to the statues of Metz and Strasbourg. 
The cities no longer in mourning. Soon to be 
entered by the French troops. 

Another \one\y fete for me. But I had one dear 
visitor, Lucinda. Pale, exhausted, all eyes under 
[91 1 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

that night-blue veil I shall be so sorry, for aes- 
thetic reasons, to have her give up. She looks about 
at the end of her tether. The climax of her intense 
effort of service has been reached in these last 
days — among the worst they have had at Blake's. 
Mostly men wounded on the nth itself. She has a 
patient, a "wonderful boy," blinded at ten o'clock 
that day. 

At eleven o'clock on the nth a number of the 
hospital staff, nurses and doctors, were gathered 
in a small room downstairs about the coffin of a 
much-beloved patient — a boy whom they had 
tried desperately to save, and who had won all 
their hearts. The victory guns and bells sounded 
through his burial service. 

Lucinda says that she went to the window 
afterwards in a sort of daze. She saw people 
across the way putting out flags. They had "a 
strange expression on their faces." "As if it 
was n't true." 

"That's the way I felt myself," said the poor 
child. For months she has lived — as much as 
any young infantry officer — with the immense 
sacrifice, suffering, heroism of the doughboys. 
She has dressed their shocking wounds, used 
every resource of her being to bring them back to 
life, watched by them as they died — died calling 
for their mothers, calling her "mother." And 

[92] 



PAX IN BELLO 

from this consecration, this sense of the constant 
company of the dead whose lives are the stuff of 
'Victory," she emerged on Armistice night into 
streets "like New York on Election Night. No 
exaltation. No prayer. No knowledge of what I 
had left in the hospital on any face." Only self- 
indulgence. Excess. Stupid rejoicing. Drunken 
officers (always this chorus). 

''While the war lasted the excitement and 
necessity of it kept you going. But now you can't 
help wondering if it had to be. Why it had to be. t 
Whether the world will be the better for it. . . ." 

She looked at me questioningly. But I have no 
reassurance to offer. Even if I had, this jeune 
fille bien elevee — Lucinda was preeminently the 
American equivalent of the term a year ago — 
would not accept it at second-hand, after her 
months of very fundamental first-hand expe- 
rience. 



Miss O. went to a service to-night and one of 
the Alsatian sisters got me ready for the sleep 
that never comes. She had been to the procession 
— in which the other sister marched in costume — 
and says the crowds, though very reverential, 
were also unmanageable. Sweeping away all the 
** barriers" and making hay of police regulation 
[93] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

— to the joy of the American soldiers, perched 
on guns, statues, and Tuileries tree-tops. The 
crowd was further harrowed and thrilled by the 
airplanes, flocks, droves of them that came dart- 
ing and wheeling down from the Arc de Triomphe, 
doing the most breathless stunts, to meet clouds 
and coveys of pigeons set free in the Concorde. 
All this in the blue November haze with a tinge 
at the end of sunset gold — the colors of the 
Paris late autumn and of Puvis de Chavannes* 
**Sainte Genevieve." And afterwards a "Victory 
Te Deum," celebrated at Notre Dame. 

I can forego the procession. But what a hunger 
I have for those rolling chants, those Gothic 
spaces, those prayers of anguish and thanksgiv- 
ing! . . . 

November i8 

The French troops are advancing into Lorraine. 

, They will probably enter Metz to-morrow. In 
time I shall hear of it from F. T. 

I The Herald — so very anti- Wilson — has to- 
day a patronizing editorial eulogy of our Presi- 

♦ dent which ends by insisting, in Madame S.'s 
manner, on the value of his visit to the devastated 
regions. I am sure he ought to see them. Yet if 
these scarcely veiled suggestions that he does not 
know what the Boche really is like are not 

(94 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

dropped, he will feel as rebellious as I do when 
asked to write a dictated (the French word 
tendancieux has no good English equivalent) 
article. Arthur Ruhl's account of his visit to 
Alsace comes back to me: he was so thoroughly 
and officially *' guided" that he got no chance to 
talk to the natives. Finally he succeeded in dash- 
ing alone into a tobacconist's and stammered out 
to the old woman: "Do you want to belong to 
Germany or France?" **To neither! " she replied 
with spirit. That is a story one should not re- 
member just now — for comfort. 

November 19 

Rick has reappeared. As large as life and twice 
as casual. Surprised — and sorry — that I have 
worried about him. Did n't think about wiring 
or writing, since he was O.K. 

He does not retreat to the corner this time. 
Stands a moment taking me in from his well- 
balanced height. Remarks dubiously that I look 
better and 'Very clean." (He is thinking of the 
wounded at the front with their ghastly smooched 
faces.) Then disposes himself astride one of the 
stiff chairs by my bed. 

** Well — here you are — after all — mon cher,'' 
A flash of responsive affection from the very 
depths of his reserve. (Good. He wanted the 

[95I 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

assurance that I am glad he is alive. Especially 
as he does n't know whether to be glad or sorry 
— for himself.) But his next look hopes I'm 
aware that this is a rotten anti-climax, after so 
many heroic farewells to life. 

*' Now what?" 

The light dies out of his voice and his eyes. 
He is going home — very soon. They will re- 
lease him on his mother's account. Offered him a 
job in Paris. What's the point, after the front? 
Naturally it would be pleasant. Too pleasant. 
So many pleasant times in Paris in the last two 
years and a half. Town already not what it was 
during the war. Of course there's Poland. And 
Russia. And the Balkans. All sorts of openings 
for action and adventure — this with a sigh and 
thickening gloom. Every temptation to stay on 
and on. 

** Don't you do it. Rick. If you go home now, 
you'll always have the best of the two worlds. 
If you stay, you'll turn into a rolling stone on 
both continents. But I realize how hard it's go- 
ing to be — after so long." 

His dark, concentrated gaze inquires whether 
I do realize. . . . 

'* Have you cabled?" 

"'Have survived the war. Please send $500 
against return.'" An eighteen-year-old twinkle 

I 96 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

at the recollection. "That will convince mother. 
The squadron thought it was a great idea — 
trying to grind out sentimental family telegrams." 
On the strength of cheerful reminiscence he takes 
a comfortable stretch to the iron cross-bar of the 
bed with his beautiful three-hundred-franc boots. 
(His are not, alas, the first military boots for 
which that bar has had a fatal attraction. And 
the contriteness of the culprit is almost worse 
than the jar to my fractured ankles.) 

"Got the news of the Armistice at the squad- 
ron the night before. Picked up by wireless. By 
the Colonel's orders it was announced at the Y. 
The officers threw their chairs through the mov- 
ing-picture screen. The men proceeded to blow 
up everything in sight. Stole all the bombs and 
flares, piled them in the road, and set them off by 
a system of electric wiring — with terrific effect. 
Everybody on the loose. My mechanic acciden- 
tally ran into the squadron adjutant. He jumped 
aside and saluted, but the adjutant yelled, 'To 
hell with that stuff, the war's over!' The Colonel 
ended by putting the whole camp under arrest." 
The news produced in the flight commander 
a fierce desire for liquor. Commandeered the 
Y.M.C.A. Ford and scoured the country. When 
he got back, though, with a case of champagne, 
neither he nor any one else wanted it. The new 
I 97 1 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

men, who 'd never been ** across " and were cheated 
out of their war, went to bed. The old men sat 
up — half-heartedly. 

*'In the morning we listened for the guns. 
Heard them. Wondered if we'd be sent out. 
Were n't. Though it was perfect 'flying weather' 

— pouring rain. We were playing chess at the 
time hostilities ceased. Somebody gave a whoop. 
That was all. In the afternoon the Colonel 
graciously pardoned us. Read a report on the 
valorous exploits of the squadron. . . ." 

At this, gloom thickens again. I am to know 
that the war came to an end just too soon for my 
young friend. Recommended for a captaincy. 
Been promised a squadron of his own. In another 
month would have been a Major and a CO. 

** Another month!" 

A rather wry smile responds to my protesting 
tone. Oh, well — he did n't get his month. Just 
as he never got his chance to go out with the 
French. Did I remember all the months he 
waited — all the false alarms of orders? And 
now, after the last disappointment, he went up 
and did such suicidal acrobatics in a heavy old 
Breguet that he was nearly put under arrest? 

"There could be no heroes— could there?" 

— he continued after a pause — "if man really 
had a sense of humor. Nothing I undertake seri- 

[98 J 



PAX IN BELLO 

ously but the gods turn it to farce. I give 
you my word. The war is the biggest farce of 
all." 



Why will people stay so long? 

That boy haunts me. He is so completely out of 
a job and sees nothing ahead but moral respon- 
sibility — from which he shrinks as much as he 
courts physical danger. Superficially, the world 
is his oyster. He takes daily life with delightful 
ease and buoyancy. He is having a "good time'* 
now. Disporting himself — so far as a clean- 
minded, vigorous, Western American can — in 
the elaborate manner prescribed by Paris to 
drown care. For the conscious or unconscious 
purpose of ignoring and repressing his doubt of 
himself. 

The doubt that he may not make good in real 
life as he has made good as a flyer. At heart he 
knows the worth of his own stuff and mettle. Yet 
he is afraid that his vaulting ambition will peter 
out when no longer backed by the violent incen- 
tive of risking the neck. Yes, he is seriously out 
of a job, now it is all over. . . . And despite his 
zest for action he has a literary temperament. 
He never acts but he reacts on his action. On 
paper. Don't I know? Always plumbing his still 
[99] 



SHADOW'SHAPES 

waters and adding himself up, especially in his 
letters. His friendship for me is little more than 
a peg on which to hang his conclusions. I hap- 
pen to be near and he must disclose to somebody 
the black turmoil of his spirit. . . . 

Too much responsibility for me as I lie here on 
this helpless bed. The dark whirls so fast that I 
can't even get things clear. I have no job to 
offer him on a silver salver. How shall 1 con- 
vince him? Conflicts of peace — they generate 
the creative impulse as war generates the destruc- 
tive. He can't stop fighting. He must create. . . . 
Write his adventures and his doubts into books. 
It will need, my friend, the best of your brain 
and nerve. 

November 20 

For the first time since my arrival, nearly a 
month ago, I was lifted, just now, on to a 
stretcher so that my mattress might be turned. 
To ease the strained, stiff back on which I must 
continue to lie. Miss M., the kind head-nurse — 
as Irish and dark as her assistant, Miss G., is 
Saxon and fair — directed three nurses in the 
job. They were almost more nervous than I. 
The horror of having my left foot touched. . . . 
On the days of dressings my dread begins long 
before light. 

[ 100 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

Again in my fresh, level bed (but they forgot 
to take out the grinding ache at the bottom) 
I suddenly realize, as Miss M.'s tired face van- 
ishes out of the door, the weight of responsibility 
she carries. Realize with compunction how deep 
in individualism I have sunk, shut up so safe here 
in my grey cell. I know — and dread — the 
patient in the next room by her cough which 
comes hoarsely through the wall. I know the one 
overhead by the quick, trotting step of her nurse. 
But all the other horizontal shapes are nebulous. 
Suddenly their need of medicine, dressings, ther- 
mometers, hot-water bags, becomes vivid to me. 
I wonder do they accept these sacramental hos- 
pital attentions as a matter of course or do they 
marvel — as I, though fallen from the grace of 
unanimisme, still marvel — at this avaricious 
hoarding and cherishing of the breath of life that 
so extraordinarily contradicts the squandering of 
war. They may not think so much as I do about 
the breath of life. They may be rolled in coma. 
Or restlessly tossed, like skiffs moored in a stormy 
harbor. 

For me, too little coma. I am always stringing 
my heart to courage and persistence. It keeps me 
stern. ''Pauvre amie,'* said A. S. the other day, 
*'vous avez un air que je ne connais pas, . . . un 



air si severe. " 



[ loi ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

November 22 

One great imaginative picture we shall keep of 
this war that has been so poor in ceremony and 
circumstance: the surrender of the German fleet. 
The newspapers are full of it to-day, and even 
they, with their debased verbal currency,' can't 
cheat the spectacle of its terror and romance 
and retribution. Watching those German battle- 
ships sailing, Indian-file, into the British lines and 
captivity, I felt for the first time a thrill of vic- 
tory. Down goes the German Colossus into great 
dark waters — with a splash that rocks my bed. 
And as the waters grow calm and blue again the 
British Empire appears, floating serene on their 
crest. Gibraltar, Africa, Egypt, India, Australia, 
Canada — fabulous names, encircling the world. 
All that Britain has done through the war, her 
courage and fortitude and inarticulate determi- 
nation, her very blunders and stupidities, seem 
compensated by the mastery of the sea this day 
affirms. 

Yet Wilson proposes to change "mastery" into 
'* freedom" — freedom even for the prostrate 
Colossus. This opens too large a window on the 
world and the Peace Conference to be comfortable 
for one's shivering intelligence. 

* • * * 
[ 102 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

My nurse regrets that I have had no visitor on 
this "historic" day. I did have one, quite as real 
as if she had come in flesh and blood from London 
to sit beside me in the grey afternoon light — so 
that we might try to puzzle out together, in dis- 
jointed fashion, how closely the cooperation of the 
armies and the fleets which to-day's events sub- 
stantiated had really linked American and Eng- 
lish understanding. . . . 

"I am always intensely conscious" (she said) 
*'that Wilson will be the chief figure at the Peace 
Conference. Practically all Europe and England 
will have to submit to his dictation — and a great 
many won't like it! And a certain proportion of 
the group are the men who best represent what 
great things a great England has stood for. . . . 
They will not respond to his moral idealism where 
material and practical advantage are concerned 
any more than they have responded to America's 
militant ardor during the past year. We in Eng- 
land had suffered too long and too deeply. . . . 
Yet how lucky that America could generate 
sufficient ardor to take , the wonderful stand 
she did." 

**It was" (I answered) "chiefly with lack of 

ardor that the American troops reproached the 

British with whom they were brigaded. They had 

been trained and nourished in an atmosphere of 

[ 103 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

enthusiasm and they encountered a frost — tea 
instead of coffee, and a frost." 

''Yes" (she replied), "I have been going to 
a large American hospital twice a week as Red 
Cross visitor. The men suffer so pluckily — I am 
melted with appreciation and affection for them. 
When they get up they drift to us for a cup of 
tea and fill every nook and cranny of the house 
with an insidious breeze from America. Their 
criticism of the familiar type of British officer is 
racy enough. They vaguely strive to do him a little 
more justice than their prejudices encourage or 
allow. But the deep and great entente of the press 
hardly assumes more impressive shape than this 
to the objective eye. ..." 

''Is n't that" (I insisted) "somewhat the fault 
of the whole British military policy of deliberate 
separation and detachment? I can't tell you how 
remote England and the British front have felt 
to me during this last year in France — almost 
more so than they felt in America. From the 
moment I landed in Bordeaux the war as it con- 
cerned France and America was interpenetrated, 
crudely actual ; the Franco-American entente was 
a thing of deeds, not words. But the British- 
American remained vague and 'literary.' Just 
because the British army — in spite of a certain 
number of British officers in Paris streets and 
[ 104 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

restaurants — remained physically and psycholo- 
gically far away, like something written in a 'war- 
book.' " 

"What changed my own feeling" (I went on 
to say) "was the appearance, toward the end of 
last July, in the courtyard of the Hotel de France 
et Choiseul, of a young officer in the uniform of the 
Royal Field Artillery — a little Anglo-American 
whom I fancy you know well. (He looked ex- 
traordinarily, touchingly young to me, though he 
bore himself with an easy grace that seemed his 
natural approach to life.) We sat down together 
at an iron table. He chose a henedictine in the 
interest of sophistication — though it should 
have been a citronnade, for the day was warm. 
Then, with a happy, humorous, philosophic smile 
that recalled his Scotch father — and took me 
straight back to certain games of Slap Jack into 
which a carrot-headed, freckled, argumentative 
little boy of nine put much zest — he began to 
talk of his rediscovery of America. 

Boys in the A.E.F., girls, such charming girls, 
in the A.R.C. Their names were echoes from dis- 
tant American years, and his interest in them had 
a gleam of his mother's sensitive appraisals. He 
was eager, delighted with both America and Paris 
— with Paris (which he was seeing for the first 
time) partly because it was so American, and 
I 105] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

partly because it was so French — so living, so 
spacious, so very beautiful, so much more than 
London, he said, the heart of the world and the 
war. Already he felt that he belonged here: 
whether rolling like a prince in a taxi-cab up the 
joyful luxury of the Champs Elysees (following 
sundry extravagant purchases on the boulevard 
Haussmann) or eating en plain air in Mont- 
martre, with gosses after Poulbot begging for sous, 
broad-hatted, cadaverous "types" out of Louise 
stalking by, and M. le Patron, in a little black 
velvet cap, and an enormous beard, playing on an 
espece de guitar e, . . . His appreciation had a fresh- 
ness and a nostalgic enchantment that I put down 
to the American blood in his veins as well as to 
relief from the front, the rather tiresome front to 
which he must return when his precious week was 
over — the British front. Before he had finished 
his little golden glass, it had taken on as sharp 
and dread an actuality for me as the front where 
Rick was bombing. In those masses of khaki, in 
that lurid and booming region shadowed by dis- 
aster, I should now see one individual figure — 
individual yet symbolic of a great risk and a great 
hope. ... » " ' 

My friend speaks at last. Or do I just imagine 
her voice, coming so dim out of the dark? 
[ io6 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

The Armistice has brought no news of Stewart. 
He has been missing since the end of September. 
Fourteen months since he left for France and the 
same regiment in which his elder brother was 
killed in the battle of the Somme — left feeling 
glad that he was old enough to do his part, 
though he hated w^ar and had the happy, reason- 
able, harmonious nature, the vital approach to 
life which seems to hold a key. War was in no 
serise his destiny, as it had somehow seemed 
Morton's destiny. 

No, whether Stewart comes back or not, I shall 
never associate him with that grim lunar land- 
scape where his brother — still borne up by the 
heroic emotion of the first years — met the end 
that his temperamental restlessness sought and 
made fitting. Morton belongs in one of those 
poignant graves, overgrown with straggling roses 
and tucked about the half-ruined apse of a French 
Gothic church in some wholly ruined French vil- 
lage of the Somme. 

But Stewart — I refuse to connect with tragedy 
the connoisseur of Chateau Yquem — *'I always 
drink Chateau Yquem," said he, with an air of 
initiation which secretly enchanted his beloved 
trio of girls at the Hotel des Champs Elysees — 
the host at a loge at the Frangais — and how he 
did appreciate the perfect art and tender Gal- 
[ 107 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

lie irony of " Boubouroche " — the companion of 
my walk in vieux Paris. I shall think of him, 
rather, as haunting always those beautifully 
proportioned seventeenth-century rooms of the 
Musee Camavalet, which a guardian, drowsing in 
the July stillness of the courtyard, had the dis- 
cernment to open for his benefit. Emptied of 
their treasures since the German advance, they 
were all the more full of Madame de Sevign6 and 
her friends for that — shades exquisitely welcom- 
ing to the si gentil and responsive young foreigner; 
whose answering salutation gave them the assur- 
ance they needed — the assurance that it was 
worth while for an Anglo-Saxon to risk death to 
save such monuments of the French creative 
mind as this. . . . That he faced death lightly 
indeed, and keenly, without phrases or self-pity, 
like all the best of his generation. 

He talked to me on the way home, I remember, 
about the French girls — the sort who wear paint 
and powder and dark circles under their eyes, 
i^sthetically they were rather displeasing in their 
pervasiveness, and he had discovered that Amer- 
icans — in their revolt from Puritan tradition — 
gave them too much attention. Sometimes one 
amused one's self by imagining what a Paris 
leave might be if one found a nice French girl to go 
about with — there were nice ones in the number, 
f io8 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

who would never have chosen that life but for 
the war. . . . Still, no relation could be so delight- 
ful, so wonderful really, as this he was discovering 
with American girls of his own kind. There was 
a freedom, and charm, and equality about it — he 
wished his sister could know those three girls. So 
animated, and cordial, and intelligent to talk to, 
so different from English girls! He was looking 
forward to the last evening — he had arranged a 
surprise: when they came up from dinner to the 
salon, there would be three bouquets, one for 
each, the best Paris could produce to express his 
thanks for the way they had taken him into ''a 
home from home." . . . 

I tried before his mother faded into the dark to 
give her an impression of his parting smile. It was 
really meant for her, who should have been in my 
place — the only blot on this last rapturous week 
was, he said, that she did not share it. 

November 23 '. 

A CERTAIN amount of bad pain may be good for 
the moral character — I may as well think so, 
though I don't really believe in Purgatory. But 
pain prolonged is degeneration, not purgation. 
I am losing, coin by coin, the last of the treasure 
of "patience" I have been so carefully hoarding. 
It has reached the point that I want to remove the 
[ 109 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPEfS 

head of any one who merely walks boldly across 
my floor, thereby causing a faint vibration of 
my iron bed, which at once communicates itself 
to my hyper-responsive ankle. I have learned, 
among my pillows, an art of timid stillness that 
would give points to a mummy. At moments, as 
after dressings, it seems quite too perilous to take 
a long breath. 

The reaction of the medical and nursing entou- 
rage to suffering whose prolongation they see no 
good reason for — as the infection is clearing up 
and the fractures presumably knitting — is in- 
teresting. Colonel Lambert meets it as a medi- 
cal man, with specific remedies; he disapproves 
heartily of my wasting away on hospital chicken 
broth. Dr. M., who hates suffering, meets it as a 
surgeon by keeping out of my room save when he 
is led here for a dressing by one of the nurses who 
rule his days. Miss O. is very sympathetic that I 
can't enjoy the hothouse fruit provided by kind 
friends, but turns prickly when a spasm comes; 
irritated with herself, I suspect (she is so good and 
conscientious) because she has not been able to 
prevent it. A certain gentle, kinky-haired, red- 
cheeked English night nurse with a cockney 
accent is the only person who can really arrange 
my fracture pillows. I begin to understand the 
New Testament when, after two hours some- 
[ no ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

times of weary waiting for her, I feel her healing 

touch. 

She has charge of the babies who occasionally 
come into the world on the top floor and this morn- 
ing, against all law and order, she brought one in 
to me, at the pallid and cynical hour of two. A 
Swedish baby about three weeks old which, when 
unrolled from its warm, sweet-smelling blankets, 
blinked wisely at the light. A miracle of a baby, 
complete in every detail! Not a bone missing! 

What saves me is that I am, even in my worst 
hours, more concerned with life and its mysteries 
than with the dykes that fate has built to hem 
it in and hinder its flow. But sometimes I am 
aware what a vicarious version of "life" I am 
getting — all through other people's eyes. Even 
the baby was held up at a distance. I am impa- 
tient to touch life again, to feel it swirling hard 
against my own body. 

Life took me at my word. I am still shaken 
from head to foot by the shock of immersion. 
Dr. M. (more regardful than Miss O. and I gave 
him credit for) appeared to announce my immedi- 
ate departure to "Number One" to be X-rayed. 
Before I knew it the revolution was accomplished: 
a stretcher with several friendly privates to hoist 
it had invaded my domain from the garden, and I 
[ III ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

was lying in an ambulance with keen outdoor air 
— how rough to the nostrils — rushing in at the 
open end, and a blurred vision of Neuilly flowing 
along behind: comfortable, high, brick, bourgeois 
mansions draped, above their discreet gardens, in 
the flags of victory. The ambulance boy did his 
best for me — "I never went so slow before" — 
but the jolting was excruciating on these boule- 
vards rutted so deeply by four years of ambu- 
lances. It took no more than one jolt to translate 
me again into unanimisme. 

The sensation of being translated into the body 
of a soldier, and into the "system" in which he 
lives and moves and has his being was further 
borne out as follows: (a) Irksome delay at the 
door, {h) Hot altercation between ambulance boy 
and sergeant in charge. The former claims that 
this entrance will save the patient; the latter 
** knows his orders" — so we eventually jolt along 
to the other one. {c) Appearance on the steps, as 
the stretcher is taken out, of two or three pretty 
nurse's aides of our best New York families, who 
gather around (blankets envelop me, and a grey 
hood like a monk's cowl falls over my head), in- 
quiring in tones whose imperious and patronizing 
ring make me squirm with indignity, who this 
poor dear boy is, etc. {d) Journey the whole 
length of the hospital on a jiggly stretcher-cart 
[ 112 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

to an elevator that is n't running. Journey the 
whole distance back to another that goes up only 
two stories. Thereafter journey the same distance 
back again to a long flight of stairs up which I am 
carried at an angle of forty-five degrees to the 
X-ray room, {e) Interim — endless wait by the 
second elevator (man having his lunch) in a cor- 
ridor full of French femmes de service who are 
carrying lunch-trays to the wards. Unimaginable 
clatter of dishes, chatter of ten thousand mag- 
pies. The new patient intrigues the magpies, 
especially the youngish specimens, and they close 
in two or three deep about the stretcher-cart, 
gazing at the drawn features under the cowl with 
tilted, frizzed heads and loving, pitying, languor- 
ous looks that stifle like a heavy perfume. 

Suddenly one soft creature gives away the 
show: ''On dirait une femme — you'd say it was 
a woman," she breathes. 

*'It is a woman!" I answer furiously. 

The ranks simply melt ! 

The X-ray itself, a skilful doctor in charge, was 
the least part of the business. But by the time the 
process a, b, c, d^ e, etc., had been gone through 
in reverse order, from the top floor on the boule- 
vard Inkermann to the ground floor on the rue 
Chauveau, I was in a state of acute and agonized 
exhaustion. There promised to be another wait 
[ 113] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

before I could be moved from the stretcher to the 
bed — nurses at lunch. But there I spoke up, in 
the manner of Queen Elizabeth or Amy Lowell, 
and demanded that the stretcher-boys put me 
at once into the flat, still, waiting bed. (They were 
only too ready to help, but Miss O. was fearfully 
shocked.) I then demanded, in the voice of Ju- 
lius Caesar or Napoleon, a hypodermic. It came 
too, and quickly (pity I did n't discover earlier 
how thoroughly it pays to lose one's self-control) 
and with it a young French nurse with sweet ways 
and piquant looks, who reminded me of my old 
friend Annie Wood and who held my hand while 
the Red Cross nurse — who never holds my hand 
— we are far too reserved together — had some 
lunch. 

The afternoon was haunted by solicitous faces 
disappearing into space, and by a queer, faint 
voice (not at all a royal voice) pleading for silence 
and solitude: ''Please don't let them come in . . . 
draw the curtains closer . . . send them away . . . 
don't let any one take me out of bed ..." 

A pitiable figure of a unanimisle I make now. 

November 25 

For two days all I have asked of the universe was 
to stay forever immured from it. To see nothing, 
hear nothing, for myself. But this morning's 
^ [ 114 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

newspapers have restored a healthy and in- 
stinctive exasperation at the substitute for first- 
hand observation offered by the printed word. 

To-day the French are "entering" Strasbourg; 
yesterday it was the Americans entering Luxem- 
bourg; the day before, the French in Colmar; the 
day before that, King Albert in Brussels. And 
all this very true and profound emotion — for the 
return of the Belgian King to his capital is pro- 
foundly moving, and so, whether or not one has 
a doubt of its entire rightness, the return of the 
French to the lost provinces — is frozen and im- 
prisoned in phrases of conventional patriotic 
fervor. And the events forthwith appear to have 
been invented as " stunts " — bread and circuses 
to amuse and placate the weary peoples. It 
seems ironic that the very instrument which did 
most to create the moral alliance against Ger- 
many has so far discredited its own influence that 
one now scents dishonesty even where it is not. 

Take the Alsace-Lorraine question. During 
the war one's French liberal and radical friends 
admitted freely that the issue was not black-and- 
white. H. B. was the only liberal I can remember 
who insisted that it was a question of flat justice, 
restoration of stolen property. I wonder what his 
response would be to a passage from Arthur 
Young — the famous eighteenth-century English 
I 115] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

traveller — who, after a journey in 1789, repre- 
sents the French as the original offenders against 
justice: 

I found myself to all appearance in Germany. . . . 
Here not one person in a hundred has a word of French. 
. . . Looking at a map of France and reading histories 
of Louis XIV never threw his conquest, or seizure, of 
Alsace into the light which travelling into it did: to 
cross a great range of mountains; to enter a level plain 
inhabited by a people totally distinct and different 
from France, with manners, language, ideas, preju- 
dices, and habits all different, made an impression of 
the injustice and ambition of such conduct much more 
forcible than ever reading had done; so much more 
powerful are things than words. . . . Alsace is Ger- 
many, and the change great on descending the moun- 
tains. . . . The moment you are out of a large town, all 
in this country is German. 

It was Rick who called my attention to these 
observations. Because they tallied with his own 
when he was driving an ambulance in Alsace in 
19 1 6. He has a charming story of a vielle demoi- 
selle with whom he lived at Mollau, and her 
French flag hidden away for forty-four years of 
secret loyalty. But he says she was the only per- 
son of French speech and tradition in that town 
and is very dubious whether the return of the 
French will be welcomed by the majority. The 
two Alsatian sisters among the pupil nurses — 
admirably and distinguishedly of the French 
[ 116] 



PAX IN BELLO 

tradition — do much to reassure me. Of course 
one is sentimentally for France. Never did in- 
tellectual misgivings seem more ungracious. Dau- 
det's '*La Derniere Classe" made so deep an 
impression on me at the age of thirteen that I 
was almost moved to tears, last year, in Alsace 
reconquise, when I saw one of the old school- 
masters of before 1870 teaching the guttural- 
mouthed children their lessons in French. Yes, 
sentiment has won the day — until one reads the 
sugary platitudes in the press. 

I was mentally damning the whole tribe of 
journalists when in walked L. S. G. — delighted 
to agree with me, but frankly glad to be back 
en civil as one of them, — I must say it is a pleas- 
ure to see somebody not in uniform, — as corre- 
spondent of The Survey for the Conference. He 
has the real journalist's passion for nosing about 
the town, eating in odd places, standing on street 
corners and letting the winds of report blow 
through his ears, and then journeying to distant 
alleys to interview greasy individuals who prove 
report false. Jouhaux and Longuet and Merrheim 
are becoming his closest intimates. He brought 
me La Bataille which avoids all mention of Stras- 
bourg by featuring the peace programme of the 
French working-class as drawn up by the Confede- 
ration Generate du Travail in accord with Wilson's 
[ 117] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

Fourteen Points. The degree to which Wilson is 
trusted by French labor makes one fearful . . . 
Witness even the advertisements on the back 
page. One confrere offers " envelopes adorned with 
the portrait of the great citizen Wilson, President 
of the Republic of the United States ... no more 
expensive than the ordinary envelope ... all our 
readers should try this useful, practical, and eco- 
nomical way of honoring the illustrious friend of 
France." 

Dr. M. burst in, in his uniform, with my X-ray 
pictures while L. S. G. was still here and found 
his worst suspicions of his patient's radicalism 
confirmed by the presence of a peculiarly dis- 
arming young man in a soft collar, with a Socialist 
newspaper in one hand and a volume of Chinese 
poetry in the other. This welcome visitor of the 
free and inquiring spirit always brings me some 
book or other, as well as all sorts of goodies — 
which is just what you might expect of a man who 
is married and a pacifist. 

The doctor was very warm about the X-rays, 
beamed with such a boyish happiness that the 
fractures had knit, that I felt touched and re- 
proached. But my left foot has dropped out of 
position and must be put into a plaster cast — 
with a hole large enough for dressings. Query 
suppressed by New England pride : how does the 
I ii8 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

blessee feel when the foot is twisted back to a 
right angle with the leg? I shall know soon 
enough. 

Meanwhile I nibble at Arthur Waley's versions 
of the ancient and sage Chinese, wondering dimly 
why they make me homesick for New York. I 
have it ! They remind me of a picture I once saw 
at the British Museum — a Confucian sage, deep 
in meditation by a cataract on a high mountain- 
side. And Herbert Croly, sunk in meditation as 
deep over his long cigar, with his glass of milk 
beside him and the sound of many disputatious 
voices in his ears, is, at the New Republic lunch- 
table, the very image of the Chinese sage. I had 
such a kind letter from Croly to-day. The New 
Republic lunch -table, for all its disconcerting 
qualities, is a place I 'd like to be. . . . 

November 26 

The milestones in hospital lives are not very 
conspicuous, but I am aware of having reached 
one to-day. Indeed it lies, very white and heavy, 
in the bottom of my bed — a cast on my left leg. 
My room is the first on the downstairs corridor, 
so my journey on the stretcher-cart to the exam- 
ining-room, which is just to the right of the front 
door, was very brief. The point is that in spite 
of the bad results of the last journey, and in spite 
[ 119] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

of the certainty of torture, I took it with antici- 
pation — the anticipation of a new experience. 
And the glimpse I had of hospital geography gave 
me a sort of mental orientation with the outside 
world that I do not repudiate as I did last time, 
now that I am back in my bed. I don't even re- 
pudiate the two Y.M.C.A. men I saw engaged in 
patient absorption of the fifteen-cent magazines 
in the big reception-room that opens with much 
glass on the garden. I merely noted that the 
species had not been changed by the Armistice. 
Unmistakable in flavor as a Russian novel, or 
Italian spaghetti. 

Dr. M. was in great spirits, and for once I was 
well enough to like the jokes and the bustle. He 
kept his clever Spanish assistant — who looks 
like a soubrette ; also as if she would knife a rival 
in the back with pleasure — very busy getting 
things ready, while the hearty English pupil 
nurse was despatched to fetch me " forty drops." 
The doctor has a high regard for cognac. In fact 
he administered forty drops before as well as 
after the ordeal. I was, therefore, sufficiently 
braced to take in the odd expression on his face 
as he manipulated my ''poor foot" (so he always 
refers to it). He looked like a little boy with his 
hand in a Christmas stocking, very uncertain of 
the value of the object he was going to fish out 

[ 120 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

of the depths. Well, Dr. M. pulled out, not a 
mandarin orange, but a real present from Santa 
Claus. The ankle joint worked! Excruciatingly, 
but actually. Whereupon he began to quote 
Falstaff so loud and joyously that I stifled my 
groans in sheer amazement. For my surgeon had 
not struck me as a Shakespearian personage. 
When the cast was safely on, the foot self-re- 
spectingly erect inside, and a large hole cut over 
the wound, he assured me, with his nicest smile 
(which I had never seen before) that "if God is 
good" — Miss O. greatly distressed by his blas- 
phemy — I should have a useful leg yet. 

''Swing it around your head any time you like, 
now," he called after me as they trundled me off. 

A fear that I have n't dared express, even to 
myself, has by the movement of that joint been 
hauled out of the subconscious. Then there is 
this new light on Dr. M., as somebody who might 
become friendly and conversable during convales- 
cence. Thus do I make terms, to-night, with my 
aching milestone. 

November 27 

A WONDERFUL Visitor this morning: Dr. Simon 

Flexner, who has been in France a few weeks on 

a Red Cross mission, and learned by chance of 

[ 121 ] 



SHADOW'SHAPES 

my accident and whereabouts. I had never seen 
him in uniform. It admirably suits his bald, eagle- 
like head, his profile of a Roman senator. 

By some mistake he had been kept waiting in 
the reception-room, and had an autocratic taxi- 
driver, who allowed him just twenty minutes at 
the hospital, on his conscience. (What a nose the 
fellows have for newly arrived Americans. It 
takes an old Parisian like me to face them down.) 
But every second he stole from the autocrat was 
infinitely precious to me. After so much of com- 
radely and egotistic youth, so much of mere 
kindly war-acquaintance in the shape of visitors, 
the sight of this sagacious and affectionate older 
friend made something stir in the depths of me. 
He did not pretend that I was a slightly ailing 
hostess in a salon to be addressed on general 
topics with crossed legs. He drew a chair beside 
me and took my hand, and it seemed that every 
bad hour in six poignant weeks was compensated 
by the sympathy and keen understanding in his 
eyes. 

He realized that he was making me homesick — 
for no amount of bluff can prevent him from know- 
ing exactly how one feels — and left me a few con- 
soling pictures to keep by me : pictures of a coun- 
try where white-clad scientists still stood by la- 
boratory tables, disturbed by no more ominous 
[ 122 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

rumblings than those of elevated trains ; where 
in green-embowered academic halls the faces of 
young girls were still ravished by the dim en- 
chantments of the Faery Queen. . . . He brought 
me back to France with a diverting account of 
his unexpected celebration of Armistice night at 
a French hospital in the war zone where he and 
Dr. Lambert had had to ask shelter — and were 
more than warmly welcomed for the sake of po- 
lyomielitis. Of course he extracted my whole 
story — that is one of his subtlest arts. And then, 
of course, he went. Wisdom tarries with us such 
a little, little while. Then we fall back into the 
depths of our own insufficiency — which we try 
to make as gallant as we can, so that wisdom 
may not be sorry it took a look at us. 

November 28 

Ten a.m. Enter Dr. M., hurried and professional, 
his white chemise flapping against his military 
boots, followed by the usual trail of cigarette 
smoke and Miss G., carrying a strange implement 
which turns out to be a plaster-cutter. 

**rm going to cut down your cast well below 
the knee, my child." 

Blessee (aggrieved): "Just as it gets comfort- 
able." 

*'To make it more comfortable. There! Now 
[ 123 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

try to bend your knee. You see, Colonel?" — to 
Miss G. — "Stiff as a ramrod. Now, you Ve got to 
bend it every day, no matter how it hurts. If not, 
the Colonel and I shall anaesthetize you and do 
it forcibly. By the time that great and good man 
President Wilson (whom I swear I disown, even 
if I am a Southerner) arrives to ennuyer M. Cle- 
menceau, I expect you to be able to rest your chin 
on it." 

Exit en coup de vent, leaving Miss O. and me 
to the new morning occupation of knee-bending. 

At eleven comes Colonel Lambert with his 
blend of the Rooseveltian and Mephistophelian — 
square, burly shoulders that deny the implica- 
tions of his dark, pointed beard and snapping 
brown eyes. He carries a large bunch of Parma 
violets, hoping in their delicious perfume to dis- 
guise the bitter flavor of his news: he has his 
orders and is sailing in December. The words are 
scarcely out before R. M. follows him in, looking 
grave under her Red Cross hat because she has the 
same news to tell : she is going home for Christmas. 
My two chief Paris props knocked out from under 
me at the same time! 

It does make me feel light-headed for a mo- 
ment. Not only that they have been so perfect 
in kindness, kept such a constant, responsible 
eye upon me ever since I drove up to the F. et 
[ 124 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

C. in that midnight ambulance. What hits me 
harder, I believe, is the idea that the American 
Red Cross can "run" without these two high 
authorities ; for that means that the war is over — 
psychologically. Physically, it has been over for 
some sixteen days. But in fact its images and 
symbols have, if my head and the heads of my 
visitors are any indication, continued completely 
to preoccupy us. 

Now the readjustment has come. The clock of 
destiny is about to strike the hour that will banish 
from the Paris stage the servitors of war. The 
peace-makers, waiting impatiently for the signal 
to take their places, will make no bones of turning 
the war-workers into the streets (a new hotel 
requisitioned every day — the bumptiousness of 
them, after we have saved Paris, say the war- 
workers.) Far better to go, as these two perspica- 
cious people are doing, before the era with which i 
they have been so deeply associated ends, and the \ 
character of Paris changes. I long to go, too. ' 
Considering the intensity of my own connection 
with the war period it is a strange fate that will 
keep me skewered to a bed on the periphery of the 
Peace Conference while, one by one, my war-time 
friends are off to the U.S.A. 

The era of the war and of the Hotel de France 
et Choiseul. Never again shall we all sit in that 
[ 125] 



SHADOW'SHAPES 

courtyard under a glass roof pierced by shrapnel, 
drinking caustic coffee served by the lugubrious 
Charles and sugared from our personal stores, 
while the stars prick patterns in the deep purple 
of the sky, and in a yellow window square a type- 
writer begins to tap. Tap-tap-tap: come-in-to- 
work. No, another ten minutes. There'll be a 
raid by that time. Besides, Colonel Lambert is 
reporting some "inside" gossip from G.H.Q. Mr. 
Ford has details about the devastated regions. 
Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Lambert are discussing the 
latest freaks in behavior in women war- workers. 
One of the Rockefeller doctors draws up a chair 
to tell how the sub-prefect of a certain depart- 
ment took him fishing for shrimps — it is done 
with beefsteak — in the interests of tuberculosis. 
And Gertrude pauses long enough in a dash from 
the street, where she has been picking up a lost 
private and finding him a night's lodging, to the 
room where six Y.M.C.A. workers with griev- 
ances have been champing for several solid hours 
to relate an anecdote of a submarined negro 
stevedore : 

"Ah tell you, miss, all ah asks of dis 'yere war 
is that ah shall be a suhvivah.'* . . . 

The F. et C. without the Lamberts . . . Incon- 
ceivable! They should, on their departure, be 
presented with a set of "souvenirs": a square of 

[ 126] 



PAX IN BELLO 

prehistoric red carpet; a bronze and gold Empire 
clock under a glass case; and {specialite de la 
maison, cru de M. le proprietaire) a dozen bottles 
of that ineffable and heady golden wine of Tou- 
raine. 

Evening 

The pain again. I feel as if my left leg were 
being squeezed in one of the iron boots the Inqui- 
sition invented for purposes of torture. 

I wish Madame F. T. had n't come on a day of 
pain, a day of souvenirs and departures. Yet per- 
haps that was the right time, for her heart and 
mind are still sore with war and grief. Her mother, 
who was very ill during my last long stay with her 
in the country, died just after my accident. 

She sat down quietly beside me in the darkened 
room. But there is something nobly unresigned 
in this French woman, who carries her head with 
a poise that few women achieve — the more bonds 
that life puts upon her, the more she constrains 
herself to resignation and quietude, the blacker 
the veil which drapes that head, the more un- 
quiet the essence of the spirit, the more gorgeous 
the gleam of the red hair and white skin through 
the veil. I could lie here forever and look at her. 

Her first words take me straight back to No- 
vember nth. 

[ 127 1 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

**Ah, chere amie, you are fortunate not to have 
seen Paris on the day of the Armistice — you who 
love Paris. It was dreadful! What disillusion in 
this poor, petty human nature which reacts so 
basely from its fine emotions! How can you Prot- 
estants put the confidence you do in the human 
will? It has no strength at all when the mysterious 
force of life reasserts itself.'* 

I saw her spurning the streets, scorching the 
pageantry and the easy detente with those fierce, 
violet eyes. 

*' Think what the war has been to my family 
alone. One of the least afflicted." 

Your family! I do think of it constantly, and 
with gratitude, as I lie here. In its two perfect 
settings. In the old house on the quai with the 
poplars along the Seine crinkling their leaves 
under the windows — the house where two broad 
streams of French tradition, Catholic and Prot- 
estant, literary and artistic, mingle so happily. In 
the little, half-timbered country house next your 
mother's above the valley near Versailles where 
you have welcomed me to a still more intimate 
and gracious rusticity. A family always, in spite 
of its simplicity of heart, in spite of its hospi- 
tality to all sorts and conditions of men and 
opinions {''chez moi,'' you once said to me, ''c'est 
tout ce qu'il y a de plus salade'') looking down on 
f 128 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

the world with the remoteness of achieved perfec- 
tion. Always bathed in the most golden light of 
France — until the war turned the whole French 
sky lurid. 

I think especially of a night at the end of May, 
six months ago, when you and I sat up far into the 
small hours. We are in your husband's study which 
seems, even by day, detached from the material 
universe. A spot of perfect peace and isolation 
such as writers dream, but never possess out of 
France: opening with a great window and sus- 
pended, as by a mysterious cord let down from the 
sky, above your deep, somnolent vale. To-night 
the valley is dark ; only a gleam from the moon on 
the roof of an old chateau, the spire of the village 
church. Only one earthly light, the yellow eye of 
the gare. 

But into the room flows a strong, intermittent 
pulsation: the guns of the front. Nearer, more in- 
sistent every hour. And so you are packing a few 
things. Your beautiful household linen. Your 
husband's notebooks. Now and then you pause in 
your investigation of one of his cupboards to show 
me your daughter's first sketch-book (that cer- 
tainly must go in. The child had an extraordinary 
gift for caricature) . The last birthday gift of your 
younger brother, killed in early September, 191 4, 
before his poor little wife had even had a letter 
[ 129 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

from him, several months before the birth of his 
child. If only that cuckoo would stop! Waked, 
perhaps, by the guns, he is mocking and calling in 
the dark tops of your ancient trees. And the scent 
of roses and heliotrope floating on puffs of warm 
wind. 

Standing at the window I hear a new sound 
against the reverberation of cannon: a rumbling, 
a squeak of brakes, a shrill whistle ; a troop train. 
Slowly it winds its caterpillar way up the dream- 
ing valley, breaking the white mist with a heavier 
column of white smoke. 

"How many times in the last four years," you 
say, from your knees on the floor, **my second 
brother has travelled through our valley with his 
big guns on a train like that, on his way to a new 
sector — just seeing the tops of our roof and my 
mother's. Sometimes he manages to send up a 
line by the chef de gare.'* 

(I lunched with them both on the quai in 1912, 
I remember, when he was a successful young 
novelist and a delicate precieux instead of an 
artillery officer) . 

The number of images and thoughts that can 
flash through one's head in two minutes. 

" F. is in Alsace, you know," goes on my visitor. 
** He is sending you a letter about it. It's been a 
very great emotional experience, a sort of com- 
[ 130 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

pensation for all his disintegrating war service of 
the rear." 

So your husband, my black-bearded friend, 
comes to join us. I see him wandering like a lost 
soul in his Paris library on one of his leaves, seek- 
ing — for his generous, curious intelligence must 
always be seeking — the significance of Wilson. 
Discussing at lunch the implications of the Amer- 
ican intervention. But the sort of lucid searching 
and fine-spun deducing to which his mind is ac- 
customed is bustled and deadened by the material 
conditions in which it must work, and still more 
by preoccupation with the destiny of France. To 
him the personal cost of the war is, I believe, a 
very subtle cost in intellectual freedom. 

Your boy, coming in from his lycee to take 
his place at the lunch-table — absurdly like his 
father — complains of a loss in intellectual stimu- 
lus. All his teachers are so weary, and so dull, 
and so old. The young, vital ones are dead or 
lighting. 

Your daughter has no complaints to make as 
she starts out for her war-work, with her wavy, 
willowy gait. (She is more than half your age — 
for you were married at seventeen — and has a 
bloom like a peach, and lips red as midinettes can- 
not make them with all the rouge of the Galeries. 
Her dress has a nuance of the more romantic era of 
[ 131 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

those two grandmothers who have been, perhaps, 
her closest friends.) She loves to nurse refugee 
babies, and do up bundles for prisoners. She loves 
to write letters. (Yes, I have looked up and seen 
her, many a time, bending her small, modelled 
head, on its slim neck, over her writing-table in 
the window where she sits like an enchanted 
princess under the tree-tops.) It is you who sigh 
that she does n't know what she is missing; that 
the years from sixteen to twenty are normally 
the only gay and irresponsible ones in a French 
girl's life. She has spent those years in such anx- 
ious and elderly society ! Never to meet a young 
man save on a leave, with the doom of death 
ahead . . . 

^'If you knew, ma chere, the recalcitrant 
thoughts I have dug into my carrot patch." 

I do know, for I have watched you digging — 
with fury and determination. Gardening has been 
the chief of your war-work — with the adoption 
into your family of some young refugees. You 
have a native gift with peasant boys, as well with 
carrots and bees and goats. Yet only an aristocrat 
can wear sabots as you do. And shall I ever forget 
the day of rich September, when, in a moment of 
joy, standing in the midst of the war-time flock 
you had settled in your rose garden, you suddenly, 
laughing, seized your old ram by the beard and 
[ 132 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

drew him prancing like Capricorn on an antique 
coin across the terrace, while the sun burnished 
your copper hair and the young kids skipped about 
you? 

Can that be only two months ago? The face 
under the black veil is tragic. She is preparing to 
go; regretting that she lives so far, asking what 
books and food she can send me. And she has a 
last word : 

"Whenever, during these four years, I took a 
train I used to wish I might go on travelling, on 
and on, never stopping till the nightmare was 
over. But now it is over I have no sense of reach- 
ing a goal. Wherever one looks, blackness and 
devastation. ... No doubt . the separation has 
been hard for American wives and mothers — 
but how brief! And your men go back to an- 
untouched country. Forgive me," she added, 
squeezing my hand. **I am violent and passion- 
ate. At least I used to be passionate. I am still 
violent. And I revolt." 

She is gone, and I think of my morning visitors. 
It is true that six months from now Dr. Lambert 
will be so plunged in his recovered practice that 
his two years and a half of war-time Paris will 
seem a dream. R. M. will again be using the 
resources that have so finely served the Red 
[ 133 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

Cross in New York civic activities. And New 

York won't look or feel very different. But the 

house on the quai — though no bomb pierced the 

roof — and the house over the valley — though 

the linen and the souvenirs d'enfance are back in 

their cupboards — will be changed. The golden 

light that bathed them and gave your spirits 

their special ease and limpidity before 1 914 has 

vanished. 

November 29 

Thanks to my friends, who have thrown a mirage 
of their diverse impressions on my grey wall, I 
have ''seen" the Armistice celebrated in Paris 
and at the front. And now, on top of Madame 
T.'s visit, to the sound of the salutes that an- 
nounce King George's arrival in Paris, comes the 
promised letter from F. T. Such a number of del- 
icately written sheets! I fall on them avidly, for 
his observations are sure not to be dictated in 
advance by Nationalism or Revanche or any other 
cult. 

**I should be ashamed of my long silence," he 
begins, *'if one of the greatest shocks of my life 
were not its excuse. Why were you not there, 
chere mademoiselle? I shall not try to turn your 
thoughts away from the sights you have missed. 

"I saw Metz first. I was one of the first to 
enter, carrying the first French newspapers, which 
[ 134] 



PAX IN BELLO 

I distributed for more than three hours to the 
crowd; and I assure you it was moving, the old 
men, the old women, the young men, the children, 
the old people especially, coming out of all the 
doors with hands outstretched for these first 
papers in their language — forbidden for four 
years. Metz is nevertheless the city where our 
reception was the least vigorous, the least vio- 
lently enthusiastic. It is a city with no industrial 
life, which has always lived by its garrison and its 
officials. None has been more deformed by sub- 
jection. Yet I did not think that experience could 
be surpassed. I was suspicious of the cities of 
German speech. My poor reason had given me no 
inkling of what patriotism without a linguistic 
foundation could be. 

"After that I saw Thionville, a small city in 
Lorraine where the French tongue still predomi- 
nates. But all through the villages of the region 
it was German that was spoken. Ah, Thionville! 
That exquisite morning at the gate of the old 
town, all the bells ringing and behind and about 
me the notables who had got out their silk hats — 
one wore his ancient uniform; and opposite me, 
on the other side of the road where the troops 
were to march past, the villagers, packed in close 
together, led by their cures; and behind the cures 
the young girls in costume — what youth, what 
I 135 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

freshness ! — wearing on their shoulders exquisite 
shawls which had just been taken out of old 
armoires; beautified, softened by a hundred years 
in lavender. 

''' Mesdemoiselles, what pretty shawls! Where 
do they come from?' 

'''Our grandmothers!' replied the young 
things proudly. 

"Finally, after twenty minutes of waiting, the 
bugles, the drums, the troops — these troops so 
handsome and so grave, these battalions of sur- 
vivors, these proven faces, happy and astonished 
to be so. . . . 

"If you had seen the emotion of the old, the 
happiness of the young girls, who saw at last these 
soldiers of whom their grandmothers used to talk, 
these soldiers to whom so many of their brothers 
had fled — soldiers of theirs, their soldiers, you 
would have understood, as never before, what an 
ancient, instinctive, profoundly natural and real 
thing the patrie is. And if you had seen their half- 
open lips, their fixed eyes, their arms and hands 
raised and stretched out toward the men — that 
beautiful antique gesture of acclamation which I 
had seen so awkwardly and badly suggested by 
the actors of the Theatre Frangais, discovered 
and repeated by the girls of Lorraine! And the 
troops kept on passing; infantry and cavalry, 
[ 136] 



PAX IN BELLO 

heavy and light artillery, and always the bells, 
the sun, the cries, and the ecstasy — the same 
still, sustained note of the most ancient human 
enthusiasm — the most ancient and the youngest. 

''Shall I tell you about Strasbourg? I have 
never been able to describe it. It is one of the 
most beautiful cities in Europe. Its cathedral is 
inferior to none. The sharp, chiselled mass, all in 
red sandstone, colored as by an eternal dawn, 
rises above a narrow square. No promenade of 
ancient France is pleasanter than its Broglie. No 
square of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, of 
revolutionary France, has more grandeur than the 
place Kleber. It is a very mysterious mediaeval 
city, a very magnificent royal city, a very thriving 
modem city. Throw into it a vehement people, 
a victorious army, hundreds of enchanted young 
girls wearing their imposing costume — there is a 
setting ! 

''Well, if you please, imagine now, evoke if you 
can an emotion so strong that all this exterior is, 
as it were, crushed, extinguished. I have seen a 
summer in Calabria. There are two or three hours 
in the afternoon when the blue sea, the marble 
sands, seem to be melted, dissolved in the might of 
the sun. At Strasbourg it was the same: the visi- 
ble scene was, as it were, absorbed by the might of 
the emotions, by their radiance. 
[ 157 1 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

"The visible scene I did not neglect, you may 
be sure. I am a fairly experienced observer and I 
traversed Strasbourg from end to end, sometimes 
ahead of the band which preceded Petain, some- 
times behind it, beside Petain's carriage. Follow- 
ing the edges of the massed crowd, walking ahead 
of the music, with the brasses bellowing in the 
back of my neck, and flowers showering about me, 
I watched the faces which bent at our approach 
like spears of grain ; these faces expressed ecstasy, 
and I don't know how many hundreds of ecstasies 
thus touched and pierced me in my rapid walk. 

"Looking at the faces, picking up the flowers, 
I did not give myself up to the mysticism of 
emotion ; I tried to understand what was going on 
about me. And I discerned in this mighty and 
apparently single wave which bathed me different 
sorts of waves — I am going to tell you what they 
were. 

" I modestly begin with the one that to me as a 
Frenchman is the least touching, the least flatter- 
ing; that joyous physical relaxation and relief 
which peace has produced everywhere. I have 
just read a German description of the entry of the 
troops into Berlin. The facts are strangely like 
those that I noted in Strasbourg. The horror is 
ended. The men are coming back: joy of the 
young girls, a simple joy: they are going to dance. 
[ 138] 



PAX IN BELLO 

Remember that not one of these young girls who 
are eighteen in Europe to-day has ever danced. 
At Strasbourg they were mad as every girl is at 
the end of her first cotillion, and their madness 
spread contagiously through their whole city. 

^'Secondly, there was la Patrie. I do not say 
France; I say la Patrie, I persevere in my mod- 
esty. There was la Patrie, distinct from France, 
pure and undifferentiated. This Alsatian people 
has been living for fifty years in a foreign frame. 
There has been joy in its homes, but in the mar- 
ket-place nothing — a desert and a wilderness. 
Worse still, a foreign parade, a parody of what no 
longer existed. I heard in the Strasbourg crowd a 
remark that was like a shaft of light. A woman said, 
as she watched our soldiers, her soldiers passing by, 
in the voice of a person coming out of a dream : 

**^Do you remember? When it was the others 
how little it meant to us!' 

"'How little it meant' — that was a penetrat- 
ing word. Not *how it hurt'^ — no, Alsace was 
used to it, used to a sort of lack, a diminishing, a 
flatness. And suddenly, like a transformation- 
scene at the end of a long play, the German sinks 
out of sight, steals off with his effects tied up in a 
handkerchief. And here come the trumpets and 
drums and the army, the real one, this time, of 
which the grandmothers talked. . . . 
[ 139 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

**The first Frenchman who entered Strasbourg 
did not come from France, but from Germany. 
He was a prisoner of war, the first to be set free. 
He crossed the bridge and walked straight toward 
the town. They ran out to meet him; they tried 
to shake hands with him. Red trousers! He was 
still wearing an old pair of red trousers. His 
knapsack was seized by the women. He did not 
understand what it was all about. 

''*You're mistaken,* he said; *rm a prisoner.* 
'**You're a Frenchman!* they cried. And a 
crowd followed him as he entered the town, lead- 
ing him from one place to another, giving him 
cigars and sweets. 

'''Mafoi; he said, 'I don't mind if I do . . .* 
''A Frenchman: I must get there at last, and 
be done with modesty. There is, no doubt, in 
France something delicate and generous which 
calls out love. *We are so glad to see you again,* 
said an Alsatian as he led me into his house; 
* France has always been so good to us.* That, I 
think, is a truly Alsatian remark which expresses 
the difference that Alsace has always felt be- 
tween herself and France, and at the same time 
the joy she has always had in feeling united to 
France. This marriage, remembered after fifty 
years, seems to have been not only good but de- 
licious, one of those successes that La Roche- 
[ 140 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

foucauld would declare impossible. The French 
domination has left only memories of happiness, 
prosperity, glory. 

"I interrupt myself: it's true that the French 
domination has left no bad memories. But has it 
left memories? The Alsatian I have just quoted 
was a man of years and learning. But in those 
young heads that I took in, one by one, as I 
crossed Strasbourg, those happy young heads, 
what can the name of France evoke? Say in a 
girl of eighteen, the age of my daughter. Her two 
grandmothers are seventy years old. Traditions 
are handed on very well from a grandmother to 
her grandchildren. But that depends on the 
social class. Much of France is preserved in the 
bourgeoisie. But in the people, among the peas- 
ants? Old wives' grumblings: *In the days of the 
French it was better. . . . The Germans are brutes. 
. . . The French are n't like the Germans. . . .' 
Every Alsatian knew that, and what a recommen- 
dation for us! But it's a rather negative piece of 
information. And remember always the differ- 
ence of language: one powerful tie is completely 
lacking. 

**What, then, is France, this country with an 
unknown tongue for these peasant girls? A face 
of which the features are growing dim, or alto- 
gether lacking. And yet the face is there. France 
[ 141 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

is a country for which one has suffered much. 
For fifty years much ; for the last four years very, 
very much. Her language, pleasant to hear, ob- 
stinately preserved by two or three families in 
every village, is forbidden. Whoever is caught 
saying a word is punished with fine or imprison- 
ment. There is more. France is the country to- 
ward which thirty thousand young men fled to 
enlist as soldiers the first day of the war. Thirty 
thousand departures. Thirty thousand tragedies. 
Thirty thousand young men fighting of whom 
there is no news. Thirty thousand families who 
stay behind and are persecuted by Germany. 
And now the families are beginning to learn what 
has become of the young men, the young men 
what has become of the families. How many meet- 
ings and what pathos. . . . And all this pathos 
comes from France, the unknown Patrie which 
must be very beautiful because so much courage 
is spent for her and so many tears shed. 

"I was waiting the entry of the troops at the 
Shirmeck Gate, and suddenly I saw, among the 
costumed groups, two young girls wearing light- 
colored flowered ribbons on their heads, instead of 
the usual black bows. I asked my nearest neigh- 
bor whether there were villages where light rib- 
bons were worn. She answered: *No, we wear 
black ribbons since the other war — since we 
[ 142 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

stopped being French. Now that we are no 
longer in mourning, the flowers are coming 
back.' 

** Fine elements for a legend? Yes, they abound. 
They will one day form one of the most beautiful 
episodes in history. Possibly the classic instance 
of Fidelity, as Jeanne d'Arc created, in the fif- 
teenth century, the classic instance of Salut. Here 
is another fragment: 

** The war brought France into Alsace; the 
army stayed on the border, but the aviators flew 
over the country. Alsace listened as they passed 
— listened and was not afraid. The Germans ran 
to hide in their cellars. They were afraid. They 
had to be afraid; they could not admit that Mul- 
house, Colmar, and Strasbourg were not their 
towns, towns threatened by French bombers. 
But the Alsatians laughed and said: 'France is 
sparing us the war.' And it was true. This rich 
Alsace, this gage of war, this greatly desired cap- 
tive, has remained four long years between the 
countries that were quarrelling over her, and the 
war has scarcely touched her. 

**And France has done more: to spare Alsace 
she has s^-crificed some of her finest provinces. 
Metz, Strasbourg, Colmar, Mulhouse, are un- 
touched. But Verdun, Rheims, Soissons, Arras, 
are destroyed. Alsace knows it, knows it and is 
I 143] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

moved by it. Alsace knows, too, the human cost 
of her return: more than fifteen hundred thousand 
lives, as many dead as there are living in Alsace 
and Lorraine. For every living soul in Alsace a 
man in France and of France has fallen. . . .This 
takes us deep into the legend. 

"Let us return to reality. What is France, the 
real France for this Alsatian people which is ac- 
claiming her? Visibly and palpably it is an army: 
an army with a supple step which does not ham- 
mer the soil as the other did. Officers whose looks 
do not insult as the others did. One man em- 
bodies France for the people of Strasbourg : Gen- 
eral Gouraud. He has led the first troops in, he 
commands the town. A magnificent presence: a 
long face, elegant, military, ascetic. The face of 
a gentleman, a priest, a soldier. One sleeve drops : 
an arm is missing. When he walks he is unsteady : 
he has an injured hip. But these bodily weak- 
nesses enhance the man, increase his radiance. I 
hear the cry: 

'''ViveGouraudr 

*' The success of the army is prodigious. Officers 
and soldiers both are endowed with all the virtues. 
What is more extraordinary, I believe that they 
have them. The long trial of the trenches has 
not made them brutal ; rather, more patient, more 
experienced, more delicate. How little are they 
[ 144 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

drunkards, how little poilus! I see them full of 
attentions, charming with these young girls in 
beautiful costumes, these fairy shepherdesses who 
throw themselves into their arms, murmuring 
French words a little awkwardly. The grand- 
mothers then spoke true; the French are as kind 
as they are valiant, and as sensitive as they are 
gallant. What is more, these charming French 
are also the strong. The Empire, the monstrous 
Empire, is no more; it has fallen, and in its fall it 
has broken. And now comes back France the 
light, the well-beloved, and miraculously the 
really strong, since it is she who has conquered. 
**The morning after the day when Petain 
entered Strasbourg, thanksgiving services were 
held in the churches. The cathdral is Alsace it- 
self, the parish of this province. The interior, with 
its height, its elegance, its robustness, the mys- 
tery of its transepts and distant chapels, are 
brightened by the naive and gay colors of the 
flags fastened to the pillars of the nave. The 
people are standing, eager, silent. The flags of 
the Corporations come in and pass by. The 
French oflicers file in and mount to the altar. 
They occupy the right of the choir, the priests 
the left. In the middle, two young girls dressed 
in the striking fete-day costume of Catholic Al- 
sace: gold head-dress with bright red ribbons 

[ 145 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

framing a long flag of white silk. An old priest 
mounts to the pulpit and speaks: 

***God be praised: France, here thou art. For 
fifty years we have dwelt in hope of thee, and here 
thou art. ... A few years ago one of our old 
friends died in this city. He had hoped all his 
life, and the moment had come for him to re- 
nounce earthly hopes. He gathered his children 
about him: ** My children, I shan't see the French. 
But you '11 see them, and when they are here you 
must come to my grave and call very loud: 
* Father, here are the French!' " Let us shout it 
to our dead: ''Fathers, mothers, the French are 
here!" And let us promise them to love France 
as they themselves did; more, if possible, for we 
know all she has just sacrificed for us.' 

*' Te Deum laudamus — I hear the sacred chant 
that follows as a tragic marriage hymn. The 
history of Alsace has always appeared to me in 
the form of a love story. Alsace is a woman torn 
from the man she loved, slowly re-creating for 
herself a resigned calm that she can call happi- 
ness, and that will perhaps become so. . . . The 
man comes back, he alone counts, she is in his 
arms. ... But the future? May they be happy, 
may they be happy! The mystic bell has rung; 
the officers kneel, I kneel, too, and when I arise 
and open my eyes I see the two serious young 
[ 146] 



PAX IN BELLO 

girls with head-dresses of shining red and gold 
kneeling at my feet on the tiled floor. May they 
be happy, may they be happy!'* 



Miss O. turns the Saturday Evening Post with 
a rustle, and suddenly these radiant, living scenes 
are gone. Clean vanished away. Nothing left of 
them but some handfuls of paper covered with 
decorative hieroglyphics, scattered over the bed. 

The bed. I recognize it with surprise. Slowly I 
make the tour of my room. White armoire d glace. 
White mantel with rows of books. White writ- 
ing table. French window. White chaise longue. 
White washstand. White chair. White nurse. 
Grey-white door. Bed — hard and white, with 
bars and rivets of pain. Everything pale and 
purged. 

The white nurse shivers as she reads. The 
atmosphere is chill, and the grey- white French 
winter daylight that comes through the door. 
The sun has gone into permanent hibernation, and 
I can't believe those gaunt trees ever had golden 
leaves. 

By shutting my eyes I recapture the illusion, 
though. Happy streets of Strasbourg. Luminous 
cathedral — ''In France there is something deli- 
l 147] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

cate and generous that calls out love." How blest 
I am to have French friends with exquisite per- 
ceptions, who take such exquisite pains to make 
me see. . . . 

Yet nobody's else spectacles really fit. F. T. 
is a liberal and an intellectual, but (I tell myself) 
he can't help approaching the Alsatian affair as 
an affaire de ccBur, What Frenchman can — or 
should? As Pascal finely said, le cceur a ses raisons 
que la raison ne connatt pas. His delicious picture 
leaves out every element that the heart cannot 
accept unchallenged. It no more deals with rea- 
son — for all his effort to escape from the ''mysti- 
cism of emotion" — than, in another field, New- 
man's ''Apologia." 

Moreover, the scenes he describes are bathed — 
he would admit it himself — in a special, enhanc- 
ing light, like the light after sunset in which people 
stand out in very sharp outline, yet a little trans- 
figured. I am beginning to mistrust that light 
which is, I am surer and surer, the reflection cast 
by the battle-fields. Not only Alsace and France, 
but England and France, France and America, 
have, during these war years, seen each other in 
its flush. So long as millions of men were thirsting 
and bleeding and dying together, the ardor of their 
sacrifice glorified all relations behind the lines. 

I fear for us all — the fear grows into a horror 
[ 148 1 



PAX IN BELLO 

during the still sleepless and interminable nights 
— a reaction from this exalted entente. Especially 
for the two nations I love best. American stock 
in France has been abnormally high; and the 
French cause had been steadily romanticized by 
America. That was unfair, for the French them- 
selves had no sense, during the war, of being 
supermen. They went about their job of soldiering 
as they used to do that of peasant, professor, work- 
man. Their daily effort was to minimize their pain, 
conceal their wounds under a twisted smile. (I 
remember a certain aristocrat, directing us to the 
ruins of his ancestral chateau in the Somme, which 
the Germans had blown up with dynamite: " Vous 
allez rigoler!'') Not supermen, but men and ga- 
lantes gens who in blood and territory bore the 
brunt of the war. 

We must not forget that at the Peace Confer- 
ence. But the inspired French press should stop 
reminding us. The psychological effect is disas- 
trous, after the nation's fine reticence. I don't 
believe the most sensitive Frenchman — for even 
he has a certain hard-headedness — realizes how 
it jars on the softly sentimental American when 
the Quai d'Orsay turns Madame la patronnCy and 
presents the bill. It is the tone of the Echo de 
Paris that one minds, more than the bill. Only 
the Socialist papers protest, imploring that Wil- 
[ 149 1 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

son make good the loss and the idealist hope of 
the war. 

F. T.'s fearful ^'qiCils soient heureux'' rings in 
my ears to-night. I repeat, till I am hypnotized 
into apathy, ''qu'ils soient heureux, quHls soient 
heureux ..." 

November 30 
Rick is gone, definitely so far as Neuilly is con- 
cerned, and the last door that remained ajar on 
the war is closed. 

He came out for his good-bye visit by devious 
routes — to avoid King George, who is still 
royally processing — bringing a bunch of red 
roses, which he laid bashfully on the bed. The last 
time he appeared, with Tom, he had one foot in 
the empyrean. To-day he was wistful and de- 
pressed — thoughts of Brest and Paris endings. 
He is a Meredithian young man, self-absorbed at 
either end of the temperamental scale, whether 
headed for the zenith or the central abyss. 

Talk disjointed as usual. He'd give his bottom 
dollar (very gloomily) to stay and see the troops 
march under the Arc de Triomphe. Tom (cheer- 
ing up to a grin) pitched into him for saying that. 
Told him the end of the war ought to mean more 
to him than a cheap celebration. . . . Well, of 
course. But men vary. 

[ 150 I 



PAX IN BELLO 

"They say war is inhuman. I never knew what 
brotherhood was before. Never really got outside 
my class. War is human. It's more than that — 
it deifies human relations!" 

What conviction in his voice and his long jaw. 
Every word gloriously true for his own experi- 
ence. Thank God there are many other men, 
especially in the A.E.F., for whom war has been 
personally a heightening of power and a broaden- 
ing of sympathy. But how would Rick feel if he 
had lost a leg and with it that abounding vitality? 
If he had had three or four years at the front? 
Would his emotions have swung the circle till he 
found himself with Sassoon and the young Eng- 
lishmen who have survived to complete disillu- 
sion and a burning creed of anti-war? 

Before he went we drank Dr. M.'s pint bottle 
of champagne, the one that arrived too late to 
celebrate the Armistice. Miss O. had kept it se- 
creted all this while and served it warm (oh. North 
Dakota!) in a tumbler and a medicine glass. But 
Rick gulped the vapid beverage down, bringing 
out with some difficulty that his sister and I were 
the ''best friends he had in the world.'* (He is 
going back to her safe. Safe! It ^5 a miracle. My 
trust and my charge are over.) 

The poor fellow is more and more tormented 
by the prowling and rapacious spectres of future 
[ 151 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

literary projects. He does n't yet know whether 
he is going to swallow them or they him. I re- 
member too well how I felt at a similar age and 
moment. The writing ''disposition" is a queer 
mixture of self-confidence and self-distrust — and 
America is well calculated to quash the confidence. 
Here in France, where there is group support for 
authors, and very general belief besides in the 
worth of creative work versus money-getting, a 
young writer with a real gift can rise on his 
wings straight and unafraid. With us such a man 
gets no cheers from the bystanders as he prepares 
to leave the ground. On the contrary, to his se- 
cret doubts is added the open scepticism of the 
community. Rick will find that when he re- 
turns. . . . 

Yet one dares to urge him to be a writer? Well, 
America needs him. These young men who have 
survived their great adventure have a very spe- 
cial contribution to make, and I wish they were 
all endowed in the cause of literature. For they 
are experienced, yet fresh in energy. Genuinely 
democrats, yet men of the world in the widest 
sense. They have shared with the least articulate 
of their countrymen primitive emotions that iden- 
tify them forever with the substrata of their na- 
tive land, yet Europe too has adopted them as she 
never really adopted American aliens before. They 
[ 152 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

have worn her colors, served her without slavish- 
ness, offered their blood in transfusion for her 
veins. A magnificent foundation to build on, espe- 
cially when is added a fierce and hungry need to do 
something big enough to match the war and its 
masculinity. Why should not the result be a new 
and great era in American letters? Are these 
wounded fancies? 

All I can do for Rick is to believe that his wings 
will uphold him. The faith that he can't come to 
grief in any flight he adventures has ever been the 
core of our understanding. Bonne chance! 

So many things to do in the world, and here am 
I passively contemplating this spotless hospital 
ceiling with a mind all tangled up in the cob- 
webby problems of American literature and no- 
body to talk to but a good girl (good as gold, and 
ever so good to me) whose favorite author is Gene 
Stratton Porter. 

The visitor I should like to-night is B. B. It is 
hard to realize that our literary conversations will 
remain forever unfinished. He was just a few 
years too old for the war — in the thirties instead 
of the twenties — but it might not have mattered 
if he could have got into the army. The Red Cross 
job he took as substitute, in a high crusading 
[ 153] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

spirit, left him morally unfertilized. So even if he 
had lived there would, perhaps, have been no lit- 
erary harvest. Yet — who knows? Frustration 
brings forth its own harvest in its own way. He 
might at forty have written those stories. 

In France B. B. would certainly have been a 
novelist or a nouvelliste. In England perhaps an 
essayist or a bookish Oxford don. In America he 
had resigned himself to journalism as a solution 
for the struggle for existence. No, not resigned 
himself, though he certainly preferred it to cheap 
literature. It never satisfied him, for he was tem- 
peramentally a person who creates something out 
of his own substance instead of recording fact 
from without, and the nostalgia of the unwritten 
masterpiece never left him. There was a dinner 
one rainy Paris night when the smouldering 
thoughts and regrets came out over some very 
superior hors d'xuvres — pointed by the blandly 
patronizing attitude of the bankers at the head of 
the Red Cross to assistants who wielded the pen. 
The bankers were typical to him of the rulers of 
America, they loomed till they obscured the sun 
and the stars, and it seemed just not worth while, 
that night, to be scribbling in their shadow. 

Yet it was (whether the bankers knew it or 
not) B. B. who put the work of the A.R.C. in 
France "on the map." We that had the run of 
[ 154 ] 



PAX IN BELLO 

his office will not forget its charmed atmosphere, 
the lightsome seriousness of which every stenogra- 
pher partook, every one an ardent ally in inter- 
pretation. I see him getting up from his desk 
in his ill-fitting khaki — which exactly matched 
his skin and was treated as disregardfully as the 
tweeds which must have been his natural garb — 
his jerky, hesitating word, his eager, awkward 
gesture, suddenly transformed by that warm beam 
of a smile which concealed so many fine discrimi- 
nations. He was as ready to welcome the French 
journalist as the American and as easily inspired 
his confidence. No one less supersensitive and 
humorous could have kept the Franco-American 
balance so level. 

Discrimination again fostered his genius for 
friendship, an art into which he put all the grace 
he had been cheated of in literature. It was as if 
he decided that here at least he was sure of ac- 
complishing something creative and individual. 
He gave himself so freely — for every friend, 
especially the humblest — to all the precious, 
old-fashioned courtesies and shades of gentle at- 
tention no modern man has time for — that he 
would not have had time for himself, perhaps, if 
those stories had been written. How touched he 
was by the farewell dinner organized by the Gan- 
netts in Montmartre (place du Tertre, of course, 
[ 155 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

scene of so many war dinners that went to the 
bottom of things), where we sang him out of coun- 
tenance in our glasses of vin gris while the sallow, 
long-haired poets looked on from the other tables 
— unamazed. It takes a great deal to amaze a 
Montmartre poet, and B. B. would have made a 
very good French Bohemian himself, if his hair 
and his hats and his revolts had been given half 
a chance to grow — if he had n't been a gentle- 
man of the old Anglo-Saxon school after all ! 

But he was also, with mental reservations, a 
very good New Yorker. He wrote me after he got 
home how the town looked from the window of the 
Lafayette. ... He would have bound New York 
and Paris together, in the years to come, for those 
with a stock of common memories. None of us 
can face not finding him there. Gone forever from 
our shores. Borne away on a great tide to an un- 
known land that may fit better into his secret val- 
uations, his proud repressions and reserves, his ob- 
stinately subtle and tender scheme of things. 



Sometimes it comes to me as a new and star- 
tling idea — yet I suppose it is one of the oldest in 
the universe — that the friends who have vanished 
during the smoke of battle, like young Stewart 
and B. B., are the ones who in the far future will 
I 156] 



PAX IN BELLO 

remain most vividly alive for me. Symbols of this 
era, unchanged, in high relief like the figures on 
the Grecian Urn, while the "survivors" — Rick 
and Tom and the rest — will transform themselves 
into everyday citizens, gradually losing their 
identity with the Great War, drifting away into 
unknown paths. . . . 



"We are no other than a moving row 
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go." 

Back and forth they move. Brooding, pleading, 
phantasms of this old, recurrent night-mood. A 
poilu's face, white and cavernous in a saffron 
cloud. A fierce young American profile under a 
lurid sky. They haunt me, insist on my sharing 
in some dark-purple, universal doom. 

Pain — why has it come back, piercing and 
glancing and jagged? Pain like a searchlight. 
This is what makes me share. Now I see the 
shadow faces clear. Dear, individual, friendly 
faces ... as if they could ever grow spectral. . . . 
As if I could ever forget Lucinda*s soft look under 
her blue veil. I shall recognize you in eternity, 
Gertrude, by the sparkle of your glasses and the 
radiance of your heart. . . . 

*' I was wounded in the house of my friends." 



PART III 
THE CITY OF CONFUSION 



PART III 

THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

December 4 

ALORS, ilvavenir?'' 
. ** Who 'scorning?" 

**Veel-son!" 
' Even the femme de menage, wrinkled and fat 
old sibyl, has that fact in the front of her conscious- 
ness. 

She stands where the light falls full on her many 
shades of bulging, striped-blue calico, watching 
the doughboys hobble by. 

''Pauvres gars! He'll come and visit them. 
That's what Presidents do. Visit the men they 
have maimed and ruined for life. (Why did their 
mothers send them so far, Madame? I would n't 
do as much.) But they say he 's different from the 
other rulers, Veel-son. What does Madame think? 
Moi — '' a shrug indicating that all rulers are 

alike. 

Now she is on her knees, absorbing everything 
she encounters on the floor (a scrap of paper, a 
match, dust) into her grey cloth, wringing it into 
the pail, and returning it to the floor with a vicious 
slop. The only way to prevent her from talking 
[ 161 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

incessantly is to shut your eyes and pretend to 
sleep. I feel so happy to-day that I can't do other- 
wise than look at the world and smile. Yellow 
roses like Florence in May . . . Yellow mimosa 
like Mediterranean roads between high walls . . . 

*' Madame is better, at last. That's easily 
seen! Ah, Madame, there were days when you 
were grey as my cloth" — horrible comparison! 
'*I said to my daughter, 'She won't come out of 
it, la dame.^ " 

Yes, there were days. But this morning, when 
my nurse pulled back the door of my wardrobe 
to get a blanket, an almost familiar face looked at 
me from the mirror instead of a grim stranger. 
I don't dare say it, but I feel well! 

The flow of conversation goes on. 

*' Eh bien, madame, s'il y a des petits boches qui 
resteront en France, il y aura des petits frangais 
en Allemagne,'" . . . looking at me meaningly — 
'^et des autres Puissances aussil . . . The Boches 
women, they like Frenchmen much better than 
Boches. That's funny, eh? I was talking yester- 
day with a prisoner just back. He told me . . . 
Well, the Boches are brutes. Frenchmen are n't 
like that . . .'* She stopped short, and the subtle 
shadow of a memory passed over her poor, scrubby 
old face. Light and mysterious and colored as a 
butterfly's wing and gone as quickly. . . . ''Les 
[ 162 1 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

americains non plus Us ne sont pas brutaux. . . . 
lis sont chics, les americains!'' 

Who knows what further revelations on the sub- 
ject of the ''Puissances''' in the Rhineland I should 
have had if Miss O. had not appeared just then 
with my steaming bath water. She luckily can't 
understand a word the scrubwoman says (won't 
even try to learn French because it "would be 
no use in Dakota") and thinks her "such a good 
old lady." 

Miss O., too, gives the heartiest welcome to my 
new feelings of health, and her face shines with 
sympathy for me when she lifts my cast gently, 
gently, and there is only a bearable twinge. My 
sudden release from the intense subjective re- 
pression pain insists on will mean a lot to my 
nurse, too. I shan't be such an "interesting" pa- 
tient from now on, but ever so much more sociable 
if I don't have to hold on to myself so tight all the 
while — if I am really freed from this iron-bound 
cell. 

Apparently in the little hospital world, with 
its mixture of French and American nurses, the 
Entente has been revived on the warmest terms by 
the prospects of the President's arrival. The tran- 
sition stage, since the Armistice, between the cycle 
of Danger and Death and the cycle of Peace and 
Reconstruction has been trying in Paris. Nerves 
[ 163 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

were all unstrung and nobody knew the meaning 
of the cryptic words written so large on the sky. 
Peace! Nobody knows yet, but one may believe 
the best, for something is going to happen at last : 
Wilson is coming! 

While she brushes my hair I read Miss O. selec- 
tions from the President's address to Congress, 
on the eve of his departure, published in this 
morning's Herald. 

The gallant men of our armed forces on land and 
sea have conscientiously fought for ideals which they 
know to be the ideals of their country. I have sought 
to express these ideals; they have accepted my state- 
ments of them as in substance their own thoughts and 
purpose, as the associated Governments have accepted 
them. I owe it to them to see to it as far as in me lies 
that no false or mistaken interpretation is put upon 
them. ... It is now my duty to play my full part 
in what they offered — their lives, their blood — to 
obtain. 

So far, so good. The Republican Congress criti- 
cises him for not being explicit about what his 
**full part'* implies. But he very well knows, we 
very well know, I tell my attentive listener, to 
what he is committed in the hearts of the liberals 
of the world. . . . 

A knock — the doctor! My nurse displays a 
transformed patient, and he, after one rather sur- 
prised glance, sits down astride the white chair, puts 
[ 164 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

his boots on the rounds and his plump chin on the 
back, Hghts a cigarette, twists his stubby brown 
moustache, and begins, while little devils of hu- 
mor play across his face, to inveigh against *'that 
great and good man President Wilson." Sitting 
up in my turn against my pillows I feel for the first 
time in nearly two months an ardent need for con- 
troversy. It seems to me I have done nothing but 
listen since October 19th — listen very literally 
for dear life, to prevent the dark, silent waters 
of oblivion from closing over my head. Now I am 
afloat on the stream again, I want to talk! I 
want to answer back! 

The doctor, a Francophile convaincu, reads the 
official reactionary press and echoes every view: 
there is no safety for France save in a permanent 
system of military alliances; Germany must be 
completely crushed; the League of Nations is a 
pipe-dream; Wilson is a Utopian whom most of 
America does not follow, anyhow, coming over to 
meddle in subjects too big for him. I, a Franco- 
phile convaincu of another school, deny every- 
thing with fury. Quote in rebuttal Jouhaux of the 
C.G.T., who says Wilson's words — his alone in 
any governmental office — have gone straight to 
the heart of the masses. " In opposition to a paix 
d la Bismarck, which would only be a break, a 
halt before the inevitable recurrence of the hor- 

[ 165 1 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

rors we have just endured, rises la paix Wilson^ 
radiant, within our grasp ..." 

''My dear woman, you don't believe a word of 
it. You are much too intelligent. Have a ciga- 
rette? . . . Come, now, un peu de courage!'' 

Miss O., who has been sitting stiffly by, jaw 
dropping at our lively exchanges, gapes still 
further when I accept. And the doctor looks at 
me as if I were not a patient, but yes — a human 
being he has n't noticed before. ... I return the 
compliment and observe him through the ciga- 
rette smoke. He is — well, perhaps ten years 
younger than I had given him credit f or . . . not 
over forty? . . . War service makes heavy lines. 
... I must stop addressing him in a fatherly man- 
ner. . . . He resents it. . . . Eternally a beau, like 
all Southerners. . . . (Though he looks, in that 
white hospital gown in which he lolls and ex- 
pands, absurdly like a hourgeoise en peignoir.) 

What a gifted raconteur! He is laying himself 
out to amuse me — and himself: conjures up the 
Carolina of his childhood, the Georgia of his youth, 
the French front of his prime — backgrounds, 
people, characteristics, warmed with Southern 
sentiment and seasoned with a large pinch of 
Gallic salt. We have got to the anecdote of a 
"nigger" from Georgia who had volunteered in 
the French Army at the instance of his friend the 
[ 166] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

King of the Fiji Islands, when an irate surgical 
nurse pushes open the door. 

Her eye unfortunately falling on the cigarette 
stubs, she turns very red and inquires whether 
Dr. M. has forgotten his dressings? His opera- 
tion? He gives me a sheepish look that conceals 
a sparkle of triumph. (It is good for these women 
to wait around for a Man. He had kept *em 
guessing for two hours by using me as a refuge.) 

''Au revoivy monsieur, I'll convert you to 
Wilson yet!" 

*^ Jamais de la vie! " 

Miss O.'s nose seems to be a little out of joint. 
She brushes up the ashes with an injured and dis- 
approving air, and, when I make no comment, 
remarks that the doctor will have to learn to make 
his social calls in the afternoon. 

Right from the point of view of your routine, 
my dear. On the other hand, if a perfect patient 
is a passive piece of hospital furniture, then — I 
begin to see — my days of perfection are num- 
bered. 

Afternoon 
The most heavenly rest I can remember after 
lunch. I went to sleep and woke up with the still 
amazing sensation of being afloat on the river of 
life, instead of struggling to keep eyes and ears 
[ 167] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

above water ; and savored my hospital tea as if it 
were a meal at the Tour d'Argent. In the midst 
of it Corinna ushered in, seeming, the straight 
vivid creature, with her glowing cheeks and 
bright, melting, friendly eyes and her heaps of 
abounding gifts, to hail from some halcyon 
clime — one of those lands of peace and plenty 
that make the background of old Italian pictures. 
Is it only that I now see clearly, instead of 
through a medium of cloudy or feverish feelings, 
or is America really a halcyon land? 

Sue, who soon followed her in, has n't yet found 
just the right niche in the Y.M.C.A.; a little re- 
grets important work at home. But Corinna was 
crowned with her glorious French achievement, 
and wore the usual scalps at her belt. She was 
fresh from the liberated North, reeking with its 
woes, full of plans for the Children of the Fron- 
tier, projecting a trip to Germany with General 
Pershing. 

Franco-American comparisons obtrude them- 
selves, these days, as they did in 191 7. Then 
because it was the beginning. Now because it is 
the end. Two French women have just been here, 
Madame P. H., wife of my friend the writer on 
labor subjects, and Mademoiselle G., a nurse high 
up in the French Service de Sante, who after four 
f 168 1 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

years in the war zone still directs a group of mili- 
tary hospitals. Madame P. H., a delicious little 
shy French flower plucked in a cottage garden 
— pink and white and demure, with a perfume 
of rare gentleness and sweetness; Mademoiselle 
G., just the opposite type: a plain, independ- 
ent, middle-aged spinster, big-boned, big-hearted, 
progressive, and a feminist. 

I can't help contrasting their air of immemorial 
patience — even the younger woman has it — 
with Corinna's keen edge of vitality. Even among 
American nurses who have served with the allied 
armies — women like Miss Bullard — there is 
probably not one whose stoicism and whose re- 
sponsibility can compare with Mademoiselle G.'s. 
As for Madame P. H., she has — incredible in 
so fragile and home-keeping a creature — experi- 
enced in her own person the very horrors about 
which Corinna has talked so eloquently. She has 
been a "refugee," driven from a stricken city in 
the North, holding two little children by the hand, 
another coming, leaving behind a husband mo- 
bilized, a house, all her earthly possessions. . . . 

Yes, the war service of French women stands 
out as inevitable, prosaic, planted in fortitude. 
Whereas our overseas service, at least, is some- 
thing we have gone to seek — a high adventure. 
Our American women have, by and large, contrib- 
l 169] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

uted the same element the American soldiers have 
to the war — moral stimulus, physical vitality, a 
new constructive approach to a worn subject, a 
disbelief in obstacles. But our work, even at its 
most unselfish, has not been a sacrifice. The 
palms of martyrdom go to our French sisters. 

December 6 
The boundaries of my narrow world are begin- 
ning to bulge and crack. I have had my first 
afternoon out of bed. They lifted me on to the 
chaise longue and wrapped me up and I stayed 
with the doors wide open for two hours — the idea 
is to get strength and confidence enough to try 
crutches on Christmas Day — watching the little 
garden cosmos of tents, and wounded doughboys, 
and hurrying nurses. How easily and effectively 
it turns on its own axis — so indifferent to one's 
wretched private miseries. But how damp and 
forlorn the tents are. ... I had almost forgot- 
ten. . . . 

I was accosted from the garden door by a mu- 
tilated Blue Devil from the Grand Palais who had 
a collection of hideous ''souvenirs" made out of 
copper shell-cases to sell. He had only one leg and 
part of a jaw, and told me he was going to "mani- 
fest" for Wilson and the Societe des Nations with 
the Federation Ouvriere des Mutiles and the C.G.T. 
[ 170] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

He had the Populaire in his pocket, and pointed 
out with a bitter twist of his cheek this passage : 
'*A man is coming who has kept in the terrible 
drama a pitiful heart, a right conscience, a clear 
brain. We salute him and we say: 'Be faithful 
to yourself. You have wanted to win to be just. 

Be jusf 

December 13 

Impossible to think of anything but the George 
Washington, drawing nearer and nearer to the 
coast of France. The French working class, the 
Socialists, the "people" as distinguished from 
official France, seem determined to give Wilson 
a mandate in their cause. Politics are mixed up 
in it, but the cri de ccetir is unmistakably there 
too. The Journal du Peuple says: " No man since 
Jesus, not even Jaures, has so strongly embodied 
the hope of the world. For the peasant, as for the 
man of letters, for the workman and the artist 
this name represents divine Wisdom." 

December 14 
Guns! That means ten o'clock. Wilson is ar- 
riving at the little station in the avenue du Bois. 
More guns! He is embracing M. Clemenceau and 
M. Poincare. More guns! He is starting to drive 
down the Champs Elysees through the soldiers 
and the enormous crowds, and the flags. . . . 
[ 171 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

How can I bear to be here? Scarcely a patch 
of white cloud on the blue garden sky. The hospi- 
tal feels lonely and deserted, as on Armistice day. 
I sent Miss O. to try to see the President. I miss 
her awfully. I wish she would hurry and get back. 

At least the postman goes his rounds. Louise, 
the concierge, whose rotund, competent counte- 
nance now sometimes appears at my door, brings 
a letter from Rick — raging and champing at 
Brest, waiting for a transport — to describe yes- 
terday's landing. He saw it from the dock-side 
where he got a military job for that purpose, and 
writes of salutes, of Breton peasants by the thou- 
sands — "silent, not very interested save when a 
bit drunk " — of German prisoners throwing down 
their work to run and stare across the dirty water 
at the man in the silk hat and fine clothes who is 
so greatly to influence their destiny. 

"The President himself very fine. I wondered 
just what thrill he had seeing his ugly army men, 
long straight lines of them down every street, 
(Americans being the ugliest race on earth, but a 
great lot, a great and wonderful lot.) He was stirred 
— obviously. I did not think it possible to show 
such emotion as he showed with such a fine re- 
straint and dignity. His silk hat, waved only 
slightly, was more moving and more moved than 
[ 172 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

a whole body's gesture of a Bernhardt. Was he 
seeing the French as well, or only us? Us, I am 
certain — just as I could 'hear' his wife's trite 
comments on the quaint Breton cap. 

*' We Ve been dancing — the peasants and some 
drunken quartermasters — on the bandstand in 
the square — now place President Wilson — all 
evening. Even Brest, hole that it is, is gay. 
Peasants in gorgeous gala still parade the streets 
in automobiles, passing the hat as they go — alas 
— in honor of the President!" 



My nurse is here, breathless and dazed and 
happy to have been squashed in the crowd, and 
trampled on by soldiers. She managed to rent a 
stool for a large sum from one of the '* profiteers '* 
and saw the President's smile. Every one is talk- 
ing of his smile — as if the poor man had been 
expected to weep. But Paris is so little given to 
heroics, so prompt to ridicule the least pompous- 
ness in a celebrity, that Wilson's bearing must 
have been perfect to arouse this extraordinary 
enthusiasm. 

A visit from Lippmann, Merz, R. Hayes, just 
at supper-time. They were in hilarious spirits, 
laughing at my efforts to eat my dull meal and also 
[ 173 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

swallow the far more important gist of their re- 
marks. W. L, fairly uplifted. He says the popular 
feeling came incredibly out of the depths, that 
Wilson seemed to meet it just as it was given, as 
if he did realize it was not offered to him as a man, 
but to the ideas for which he stands. ... To the 
promise of reorganization for the poor old Euro- 
pean world. 

The day has been strangely mild and sweet, 
something like a breath of spring coming in the 
night windows still. France was the first to say 
in 19 14, *'we are making the war against war.'* 
They had practically stopped believing it, but 
now . . . there are thousands of people in Paris 
; to-night who almost again believe the war has 
^ been fought for something bigger than national 
preservation. . . . 

December 16 

The press continues to jubilate over Wilson and 
he to be feted in the streets. 

But I have heard one dissenting voice at last 
and that in an unexpected quarter: Tom's. He 
came out late this afternoon to bring me a book 
and said the President's hash was settled for him. 
No, he had n't seen any of the festivities, had n't 
(scornfully) cared to, but happened to be in an 
office on the rue de Rivoli when Wilson went by 
[ 174] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

from the Hotel de Ville. He was kissing his 
gloved hand to the crowds! **A terrible omen," 
said Tom, with a disgusted laugh and a critical 
gleam. 

As if divining my query at his scepticism, he re- 
minded me of the summer evening during the air- 
raid period, when we had explored the working- 
class region beyond the place de la Nation. 
Every house, every shop, was closed and empty 
in the quarters of the well-to-do — who had 
fled to safer regions; but here life seethed and 
teemed, unquenchable and voluble and unafraid. 
Men, women, and children thronging everywhere. 
''Bistros'' full of gesticulating customers. Fam- 
ily groups seated on the sidewalks. In one street, 
badly hit by a raid two nights earlier, a friendly 
baker indicated a warehouse burnt down, three 
houses smashed in, a wall under which seven 
people were crushed, a sidewalk from which they 
had had to dig a woman, embedded like a fly in 
amber. 

Yet only one local shop had closed up, and some 
wit, voicing the general sense of mankind, had 
written on the shutters in chalk: '' Fermee par 
cause de frousse'' — in similar American argot: 
*'He got cold feet." 

''Fermee par cause de froussef' Tom chuckled 
again at the recollection. If the Germans had 
[ 175] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

marched into Paris, these were the only Pari- 
sians who would n't have budged. And now it 
was these people who were the great backers of 
Wilson against powers and potentates they com- 
pletely mistrusted. Let the President beware of 
kidglove sentiment! Let him beware of giving 
a sign of la frousse! 

Tom is desperately restless and abstracted — 
just as much so as Rick was, really — and wants 
more than ever to get away from Paris which, he 
says, is losing its wistful, war-time charm with- 
out regaining its peace-time glamour. You can no 
longer see the town from end to end in one doting 
glance — as last summer, when it was empty as 
Pisa — because a hybrid mass of foreigners ob- 
struct the vistas. Turks in turbans on the steps 
of the Madeleine! Generals of every hue and na- 
tion! And — worse — smooth, opulent, posses- 
sive, elderly civilians with decorations in their 
button-holes who wave bunches of twenty-franc 
notes like so many carrots before the noses of the 
already baulky taxi-drivers. Hard to hold down 
a job . . . 

"Where do you want to go?" 

"Russia! Germany! Any old revolutionary 
place! Life here is too much like a book. Inter- 
esting but unreal. And it '11 be more and more so 
[ 176] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

when the diplomats get going. (You'll see, the 
Peace Conference will be true to the form of all 
Peace Conferences!) I want to get into the mess 
itself. Up to the ears, ... I want to wander over 
the face of Europe — for about fifteen years. . . . 
That might be enough. ..." (He has forgotten 
all about his listener now and his keen, sandy- 
gaze is far-away.) **What interests me is just 
simply — the world ! The divers ways in which 
men live, produce, eat, think, play, and create. 
. . . That 's where everything leads you. . . . New 
Republic, politics, problem of Middle Europe, 
science of economics. . . . 

"I want a big job to tackle. . . . There ought 
to be some for a young man, especially if the old 
order is gone. . . . Well, I '11 be sure to tell you 
whether it is or not," he added with a smile and 
a flash of mending spirits. ''We're not going to 
let you miss anything just because you have a few 
broken bones! ..." 

Tom has been a great support through the 
thick and thin of war Paris. I shall miss him 
badly. His warm human curiosity, his almost nov- 
elist's sense for life, his frankness and his irony. He 
is changing — something steely and detached is 
replacing his boyish faiths. Yet I trust his intel- 
ligence and his heart. His personal reactions are 
somehow involved with the bed-rock of the uni- 
[ 177 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

verse. As the universe is now disrupted, he has to 
go and look down the cracks. Of course. All 
the more that (through no fault of his own) he 
missed the great experience of the war — the 
fighting. Though he does n't believe in war as a 
solution for the world's troubles, and knows he 
has, in his humane food-office, been more closely 
in touch with its issues — trade, economic bal- 
ance in Europe — than our common friend Rick, 
floating high over No Man's Land, he still feels a 
little cheated, a little reproached by his immunity 
from danger. He needs "to get into the mess." 
Hoover ought to manage it. 

December 19 

The King of Italy is now being welcomed, in a 
dismal rain, with — the femme de menage assures 
me — a very skimpy number of salutes. She lis- 
tened jealously as they were going off, concerned 
for America's honor, and nodded with satisfac- 
tion when it was over: Wilson wins! 

December 20 

This morning she hastened to report the opinion 
of her daughter, the postal clerk, who went to the 
station to see the King arrive. Most inferior ex- 
hibition. Only one row of soldiers! '''Je t' assure, 
I 178 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

maman' qu'elle m'a dity 'c'etait quelcongue, il n'y 
avail pas deux haies.' " 

My eyes turn only in two directions to-day: 
towards a pair of crutches standing in the comer; 
towards the window which reveals lame doughboys 
walloping along the garden paths as if crutches 
were no possible impediment. ... I shall be leav- 
ing the hospital soon, after all. . . . 

Cessation from pain is a very positive emotion. 
The psychology of the New Testament miracles 
is sound. The God who restores you to these com- 
mon functions — usually so unthankfully taken 
for granted — of sight, hearing, locomotion, is 
really the Saviour of the world. This is what gives 
doctors their position of almost divine arbitra- 
tion. There is nothing I would not do for mine, or 
my nurse, so patient and so homesick as Christmas 
approaches. (She read me a letter from the Dakota 
farm to-day about the fall butchering.) 

Jofifre was yesterday received into the French 
Academy, and M.'s account of it, and the report 
of his speech in the Debats, has set the Franco- 
American chord to twanging, clear and far. All 
the way to Boston Common where I first saw the 
bluff, serene old soldier — who in so many ways 
recalls our own Grant — lifted on the tide of 
America's violent devotion to France. How re- 
[ 179 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

mote that exalted spring of 19 17 already feels. . . . 
"It seemed to the American people that by sheer 
force of love they would instantly accomplish 
something great and comforting for the relief 
of the allied armies.'* (In French the prose has the 
noblest classic ring.) ''And they were right: this 
love was to allow France, overwhelmed by the 
hard trials of the Spring of 1917, to keep her con- 

» fidence and her courage intact." 

It used to seem to me, a year ago, when the 
early detachments of the A.E.F. and the A.R.C. 
were arriving in France, that the two countries 
were exactly in the position of two lovers who 
had become engaged by correspondence and were 
meeting for the first time in the flesh. Feelings 
were brimming over, but fashions of dressing 
and conducting the business of life were mutually 
strange and disconcerting. 

Theoretically the French themselves desired to 
be converted to the new American fashion. Our 

i confident youth, our fertility of invention, our 
vast material prosperity, our efficiency and our 
scientific method became as lyric a theme as 
"Wilsonism" is now. But let us hope some lover 
of the comedie humaine made notes of the actual 
encounter between the French manufacturer who 
pointed with pride to a factory unchanged since 
his grandfather's day and the American capitalist 
f 180 1 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

who asked when he was going to tear it down ; be- 
tween the New York business man, accustomed 
in five minutes' telephone conversation to start a 
train of events to culminate within a week, and 
the French administrative official who had not 
abandoned his habit of long-hand letters, long, 
polite conversations, and long-deferred decisions; 
between the French peasant who made his toilet 
in the barnyard, kept his gold in a stocking, and 
lived frugally on vegetable soup in a house in- 
herited from a revolutionary ancestor, and the ser- 
geant from Ohio, with a cheque-book in his pocket, 
brought up in an apartment on enamelled bath- 
tubs and beefsteak; between the poilUy with his 
pi?iard, and his resignation, and his pay of five 
sous a day, and the American private who found 
his dollars scarcely sufficient to storm the biggest 
town near his camp on a Saturday night, and 
drive French Colonels from their accustomed 
chairs to make way for his fizzing champagne. 

The question is, as the Conference draws near, 
how much understanding have we achieved 
through these various contacts and trials? How 
much even by dying side by side? The first out- 
burst of love between America and France, as 
Joffre recalls, brought us into war. The second, 
whose magnetic waves have been radiating from 
Wilson's smile into the remotest French country- 
[ i8i ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

side, is to bring us into peace. But when it comes 
to the application of Wilson's doctrine, such cheer- 
ful remarks as M. Gauvain's in the Dehats leave 
one gasping: 

**The better we know him the more do we real- 
ize that his mind, though different in formation from 
ours, is close to ours. There is reason to hope 
that our methods, apparently divergent, will ad- 
just themselves to our common purposes. ..." 

Christmas Night 
If I were Amy Lowell I should write a free- verse 
poem about Christmas Day in the American 
Hospital. All pictures. 

Little French nurses flitting in and out, like 
pigeons on blue wing. ^'Heureux Noel!'' Dakota 
sails more leisurely, plump and white and 
starched, from mistletoe to holly. Roses and 
mimosa and heaps of ribboned bundles. A 
pair of silver earrings, and crutches in the 
corner. 

*'Now for it," says the Head Nurse. She stands 
by, a little mocking, critical, and earnest. Now 
for it. Can I? Good. A bit wobbly. **Get her 
foot up again." The cast weighs a thousand 
pounds. A million fierce prickles run up my leg 
like ants, and bite and seethe and bicker in a red- 
hot ankle. 

[ 182 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

The doctor makes a fine salute, and eyes the 
Christmas bottle. Vieux Marc, with a doggerel 
Christmas rhyme about its neck. He Hstens, 
till his eyes grow moist. Grabs it, and hurries 
out. 

" Merry Christmas and cheers from Brest, now 
and forever apparently. Gawd damn." Classic 
voice of the A.E.F. Merry Christmas from Dijon 
and Ernest in an equally loud Western voice that 
fills my room to brimming. Flowers, chocolates, 
and enormous boots, stowed anywhere at all. 
Christmas dinner sits lightly on a tray. "Take 
half my turkey. All my plum-pudding." (Nothing 
fills him up. His eyes stay hungry.) ' ' I miss them 
too. Horribly. Let's talk about Nancy." But vis- 
itors come streaming in, with sherry, and ciga- 
rettes, and chocolates. 

*' Encore du chocolat? " comments the little chas- 
seur with scorn. "Will President Wilson feed it 
to the Germans?" 

The door ajar on Christmas plants, set in a row. 
Holly rustling. Doughboys snoring in their tents, 
under their comfort bags. My mood flows out to 
meet and share their dreams of home. On into 
Paris. On and on to the confines of the earth. 
And then still on, drawing strength and good^iess 
from some bottomless world-reservoir. 
[ 183] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

December 30 
I AM beginning to be worried by Wilson's apparent 
unawareness of the complete divergence between 
his views and those of Clemenceau. Is it unaware- 
ness or deliberate ignoring? The President told 
our troops on Christmas Day that he did not find 
in the hearts of the great leaders with whom he 
was associated any difference of principle or fun- 
damental purpose. And now that he is in London, 
feted and adored and acclaimed again, he seems 
to have mounted — above the Guildhall — to the 
crest of a still rosier cloud, whence he waves his 
silk hat and speaks even more nebulous humani- 
ties. It is a strange thing to see Clemenceau 
craning a stiff neck to this cloud, from the firm 
soil of la patrie and responding with chiselled par- 
ticularities. The dialogue may be thus abridged 
from the morning papers: 

Wilson: **Our soldiers fought to do away 
with the old order and establish a new one 
which will bring honor and justice to the 
world." 

Clemenceau: "From most ancient times peoples 
have rushed at one another's throats to satisfy 
appetites or interests." 

Wilson: "The centre of the old order was the 
'balance of power,' maintained by jealous watch- 
fulness. We must now have, not one group set 
[ 184 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

against another, but a single overwhelming group 
of nations, trustees of the peace of the world." 

Clemenceau: ''There was an old system, which 
appears to be condemned to-day by very high 
authorities, but to which I am not ashamed to say 
I remain partially faithful: the balance of power. 
The guiding principle of the Conference is that 
nothing should happen, after the war, to break up 
the alliance of the four powers which together won 
the victory." 

Wilson: "The foundations are laid. We have 
accepted the same great body of principles. Their 
application should afford no fundamental diffi- 
culty." 

Clemenceau: "With old materials you cannot 
build a new edifice. America is far from the Ger- 
man frontier. Never shall I cease to have my gaze 
fixed on the immediate satisfaction of the claims 
to which France is entitled." 

Wilson: " It was this incomparably great object 
that brought me overseas ... to lend my counsel 
to this great — may I not say final? — enterprise 
of humanity." 

Clemenceau: "I may make mistakes, but I can 
say, without self- flattery, that I am a patriot. 
France is in an especially difficult situation. La 
question de la paix est une question terrible.'' 

What is "France" to this powerful, little old 
[ 185 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

sceptic? An ancient, intricate, delicately adjusted 
toy that he holds in his wrinkled hands? Rather, 
a mistress, whom he clutches to his passionate 
old heart. His accent, when he speaks of her — 
again and again through this speech in the Cham- 
bre — makes Wilson seem, by comparison, to be 
holding ''humanity'* at arm's length. 

There is a rumor that Lloyd George has won a 
complete victory for England against the Four- 
teen Points on the question of freedom of the seas. 
And the Ebert Government is tottering. . . . 

January i, 191 9 
The spirit of the new-born year of victory is a very 
unrestful one in Paris. Many friends — some I 
had not seen for a long while — turned up to wish 
me well. All, whether men or women, soldiers or 
civilians preparing to rush to the ends of the earth 
— to Germany, the Balkans, Syria. The U.S.A. 
is the rarest of their destinations. 

The cumulative effect is that some cog that 
fixed their rightful place in the scheme of things 
has slipped. It is the same impression I had at the 
time of the Armistice intensified: humanity — 
especially American humanity — cast adrift into 
space. They all seem hurtling through universal 
emptiness, their one directing thought to get 
somewhere else; to arrive where a new kind of ad- 
[ 186] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

venture flourishes; where life is again a highly 
spiced dish; where they can prolong the w^ar or, 
better, forget that it is over. 

Of course I exaggerate. I am so vowed to en- 
durance and so rooted in the rue Chauveau that 
all this uneasy movement is disturbing. My own 
longing is to get out of hospital, home to the 
United States — away from Europe, from disin- 
tegrated people, back to familiar, quiet faces and 
a desk by a window on a land that has not known 
war. But the war does n't happen to be over for 
me with the New Year, any more than it was with 
the Armistice. Dr. M. now admits that he has 
been deceiving me about dates. I have got to 
stay right here for — well, Miss Bullard frankly 
says, for three or four months. She, at least, 
knows I can stand the truth, and told me the 
French surgeon's view that I shall always have a 
stiff ankle. 

Miss Dullard's tents are finally closed, and she is 
on her way home. It was wonderful to see her, and 
hear news of the blesses, but rather heart-breaking. 
The almost fourth-dimensional sense of power 
and service which sustained such women is gone. 
They are physically and nervously drained to the 
dregs, yet they don't dare to stop and rest; that 
means reflection. Tom's departure to Belgrade 
was a more cheerful thing to witness — he came 
[ 187 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

to say good-bye — for though he seems somewhat 
shell-shocked, like everybody else, the pinnacle of 
life is still before him — war to him was not the 
pinnacle. Whereas the nurse feels as the aviator 
did that she can never again find such a peak as 
she has climbed in the last years. 

A curious phenomenon I have been noting in the 
American men : those under forty, even if ready to 
go home, almost universally wish to find new jobs. 
The ones they had before the war were, they say, 
unsatisfactory. Now is the time to change. Often 
they propose to seek not only new occupations, 
but new American habitats. This is so marked 
a masculine reaction that I was surprised when 
my old English friend, F. E., who for four years 
has been an ordnance officer in Flanders — and 
turned up delightfully on leave — told me he 
was *' going back to the cotton business." Brit- 
ish phlegm? Perhaps not, as the business is now 
in Egypt! 

The doctor came in to see me this evening, the 
picture of desolation, all the lines of his face slant- 
ing down instead of up. It does not do for a man 
of the bon vivant, gather-ye-roses temper to look 
either backward or forward at the New Year, 
especially after the shades of forty have closed in. 
The present is the only safe ground, and when it 
[ 188 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

fails under the feet, as Paris is about to fail for 
Dr. M. . . . Why is it that humorists and story- 
tellers whose particular gift is to make others 
laugh have so underlying a sadness, and why are 
cynics so sentimental? 

To-night the doctor was unhappy because he 
had n't written to his mother — had n't and 
could n't. He tells me that all at once, during the 
war, after prolific letter- writing, he ceased to be 
able to set down a line. He is rather proud of 
his queer inhibition, but also oppressed by self- 
reproach towards his Southern friends and espe- 
cially towards this dear old lady, whom he thinks 
*'the most charming woman in the world." She 
sounds like my grandmother, with an aroma of the 
Waverley Novels about her. He finally cheered 
up, tucked himself into the chaise longue under a 
steamer-rug, as if for a sea voyage, and launched 
forth into a variegated version (by no means a 
Walter Scott version) of his past romantic adven- 
tures. I told him that if he were n't more care- 
ful I should be writing his autobiography. 

Deliver me, O God of Battles, from pity for other 
people or myself! That is the best New Year's 
prayer I can formulate. The men who were killed 
do not want our pity or need it. They gave their 
lives so eagerly and freely, the first of them, so 
[ 189 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

awarely and impersonally, the last of them — 
clear-eyed young figures like Stewart — that we 
are unworthy of them if we offer it. And surely 
the survivors are not to be pitied, but envied for 
their chance to put a great experience to lifelong 
use. The way we shall measure warriors and war- 
workers in the future, I am sure, is by their abil- 
ity to get away from the war, to make it merely 
the foundation of a new existence. The ones who 
live constantly in memory of it will be the same 
futile type of human creature who is always hark- 
ing back to golden college years. 

If only I could go home. The Paris scene has 
suddenly lost the brightness which Wilson's com- 
ing brought. It is murky, and confused, and 
haunted, and the ghostly voices that wail over the 
city to-night offer an ominous welcome to 1919. 

January 2 

A NEW world has dawned for me: the hospital 
outside my room. I have been practising in my 
own small domain, and to-day had the terrific ad- 
venture of walking on crutches down the long, 
slippery corridor, assisted by my anxious Miss O., 
while the whole surgical and nursing force gath- 
ered to applaud and jeer. Dr. M. is a terror on 
these occasions, sends the nurses into hysterics, 
[ 190 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

and goads the patient to unparallelled effort — 
exactly what he wants. Even Simon, the hus- 
band of the concierge, a sloping-shouldered, chip- 
per little Frenchman in blue jeans, took his place 
in the group, and with that instinct for hard 
fact that never fails the French workman said, 
^^Allez, mademoiselle, when spring comes you'll 
see how your luck will turn!" ''When spring 
comes ..." I wanted to hear, ''You '11 be leaving 
us next week!" 

The corridor is narrow and dark, and I turned 
the corner into a very bright gallery which is 
entirely glass, opening on the garden. There 
stands the white table of the floor-nurse, with her 
records: there stand a few inviting wicker chairs 
(into one of which I was assisted, with trembling 
knees) ; and there, above all, on a white bed that 
seems to grow out of banks of flowers, with a big 
blue bow on her bobbed black hair, and the vivid- 
est of dark eyes, lies one of the most charming 
young French girls I have ever seen. 

My nurse has been telling me much about 
"Mademoiselle V." — how she has been in the 
hospital since May — that is some eight months 
— under the care of the Red Cross, with an abscess 
of the lung due to careless throat treatment in a 
hospital when she was nursing our soldiers. How 
she is quite alone in the world, deserted by her 
[ 191 1 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

French family because she refused to marry the 
young man of their choice. How she is the enfant 
gdtee of the American Hospital, the friend of the 
little nurses, the darling of the doctor, the dough- 
boys' delight. How she is often in pain and fever- 
ish ; how she sometimes cries ; how she may never 
recover, but is intensely social, and manages to 
stop every one on the way to the rooms beyond ; 
nurses, doctors, visitors, caught by her perfume as 
bees are attracted by a flower, forced by her sweet- 
ness to give her attention, and kindness, and gifts, 
and news of the world. 

So, of course, she knew about the wounded 
American woman. She had heard the rumpus 
stirred up by Dr. M . and was waiting eagerly for me 
to appear. When I had drunk Miss O.'s sherry, I 
was helped to a seat beside her and we had a little 
talk: about New Orleans where she was brought 
up (that may account for her revolt from French 
family tradition) and France where she was born. 
She came back just before the war, and does n't 
know which country she loves better. She speaks 
with great vivacity, with the prettiest gestures of 
her plump and rounded arms, while the curves of 
her cheeks flush red out of a skin warm as a white 
pearl. She radiates health, one would say — 
something supremely good and sane as well as 
supremely alluring. But over her pillow hovers a 
[ 192 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

shadow. Where had I seen that sha<iow before? 
. . . Fate . . . Disaster ... I last saw it over the 
heads of the young soldiers. How blind to sup- 
pose that the end of the war had placed timeless 
youth beyond the reach of that dark wing! 

As I got up to start laboriously homeward I 
caught sight, through a glass partition into an 
adjoining room, of an old man in bed: a bald, 
shiny head with a few sprigs of white hair ; a face 
hollowed like a skull with its chin bound in band- 
ages. Miss O. replied to my question that he is a 
Welshman (she thinks) and a professional jockey, 
dying of cancer of the face. And added, in lurid 
detail, what it was like to do his dressings and 
feed him. . . . The nurses involuntarily turned 
away. ... He smiled at them, even so, and 
mumbled thanks. No war wound could be more 
horrible. And he gets, I suspect, none of the moral 
consolations of the wounded. There was n*t a 
flower in his room. Miss O. says his only visitor 
is an old wife, who comes rarely, from a distance. 

I have been thinking too long in terms of the 
wounded. In every civil hospital in the world 
youth and age must be dying of incurable and 
ugly disease, with but a glass between them — if 
we knew or cared. 

My room looks entirely different now I am 
[ 193 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

back. Small and cramped and picayune. And 
no longer peaceful since the door fails to shut 
out the rest of the hospital. Everything I had 
seen trailed in after me. Seated itself like a hob- 
goblin on my pillow, and jibbered when I tried 
to hide my head under the bedclothes. 

January 8 
Reconstruction is a miserable business. The 
reality of learning to walk all over again on two 
imperfect legs has brought my morale down fifty 
per cent. I know now just how convalescent sol- 
diers feel, sitting around a stove in a base hospital. 
The clouds of ennui which envelop the tents in the 
garden have rolled in and filled my room. Mean- 
while the Peace Conference covers itself with a 
heavy pall of secrecy and doubt, and the stream of 
visitors runs dry. The worst week since my acci- 
dent. 

Mary has talked to me a lot of the laziness and 
inertia of her soldier patients. They won't bend 
stiff knees; won't try to hobble with sticks. Ob- 
viously the reason they won't is that every step a 
wounded man takes sets up a horrid jar, strain, 
wrench, or ache somewhere. And even if he does 
stiffen his moral courage and resolve to be excru- 
ciated, his energy quickly lands him in a physical 
prohibition : however hard he works it is going to 
[ 194 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

take months and months, years and years, per- 
haps, to get that foot or knee back to real use, 
and he will be physically depleted the whole time. 
So why worry? Why not sit by the stove? 

The only thing that prevents is a certain sort 
of intelligent determination — and the arm of a 
nurse to lean on. I am luckier than the dough- 
boys in having one usually at hand. Even so, 
every snail-like progress down the corridor is as 
difficult as an ascent of the Matterhorn. I thought 
I was going to be able to do some real work once I 
was up, but my time is spent in making a stupen- 
dous effort, recuperating from it and beginning 
again. Like the tide on the beach. Only it looks 
to me, on this long grey afternoon, as though I 
should never reach the fringe of grass at the 
high edge of the sand. 

January lo 
I HAVE been walking — call it that — in the gar- 
den, assisted by chairs, benches, crutches, sticks, 
and a nurse. The garden must really have been 
pretty in pre-war days, with its great trees, and 
its flower-beds, its pebbled alleys and rococo em- 
bellishments which date back to the time when 
our hospital was the abode of some mistress of 
Louis Philippe. But now the damp, floppy, grey- 
brown tents squat heavily there — like patient 

[ 195 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

dachshunds or a discouraged circus. The alleys 
are trodden out by hobnails and smeared with 
mud from the overflowing Seine, and the clustered 
doughboys have scarcely the spirit to smile. 

The only cheerful person we met was a very 
young fellow with a dancing pair of black eyes, 
dressed in a nondescript American uniform, whom 
I supposed to be of the A.E.F., till he spoke to me 
in French. How did he happen to be here? '' Mon 
oncle d'Ameriguey The American comrades had 
taken him in, were clothing him, feeding him, 
lodging him, giving him cigarettes and chocolate, 
and the American major was dressing his wounds. 
Chic, eh? He was jubilant over escaping French 
army red tape. What would he do when the dough- 
boys left? Time enough to think of that when 
they really did go — they had been on the point 
of it so long. ^' Je me debrouillerai toujour s,** No 
mistaking that poilu accent. 

The hospital might look very pleasant on a bright 
spring morning, red brick, white trimmings, glass 
galleries. Under to-day's lowering sky the glass 
revealed only human misery. First we crawled by 
the diet kitchen : three nurses quarrelling for pos- 
session of the stove; then by the long gallery: 
Mademoiselle V. lying wan, with closed eyes. Next 
we sat down on a bench and looked up at the sun 
parlor on top of the house, now a Red Cross con- 
[ 196 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

valescent ward: six or eight women extended in 
dejected attitudes, or putting on their stockings. 

I begged Miss O. to take me away from hospi- 
tal sights. So we tried an unfrequented path at the 
back of the garden. It was Hned with shrubs with 
shiny green leaves and had that bosky and melan- 
choly charm, that luscious earthy smell which I 
have breathed at Versailles in winter. The good 
smell of the earth after so long indoors! But Miss 
O. shivered, and thought the high walls that shut 
us in from the adjoining estate depressing. She 
is used to twenty degrees below zero, crisp snow, 
open fences, wide, sunny horizons, and hates these 
leaden skies, these oozing brick walls and solemn 
brick houses behind them which look so "old," 
and don't always stand four-square to the street. 
Cities, she announced definitely, are beautiful 
in proportion as they are new, and geometrical 
in pattern and, preferably, built of wood. 

The wall makes me rebellious. I want to get 
out, since I have seen it. We painfully made the 
circuit by the Nurses' Home, past the glass-walled 
reception-room, full of rows and rows of Y.M.C.A., 
A.R.C., and K. of C. of both sexes, waiting to 
consult the doctors. My companion grew — un- 
consciously — more shivering, bored, and de- 
pressed every inch of the way. It is no wonder. 
She is engaged to a farmer in Dakota. Her letters 
[ 197 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

come very irregularly, and the Red Cross holds 
out no hope of a speedy release. 

The rumors from the Peace Conference are dis- 
turbing. I think of it now as a sort of vast, un- 
wieldy ferry-boat which is trying to make the 
crossing from one shore to another. . . . The haw- 
sers will not be actually cast off till the i8th, but 
the pilot is getting up steam, and the bark has 
begun to heave uneasily. The waves it stirs up 
are, however, rather spent before they reach the 
shores of Neuilly. It is not to be supposed that I 
can get much light from Miss O. on '' Bolshevism," 
or from Mademoiselle V. on ''Self-Determina- 
tion." I asked the hospital house-painter, a smil- 
ing, chubby old fellow dressed in a white smock, 
whom the nurses call ''Pigeon BlanCy'* what he 
thought about "Indemnities." 

'* Un tas de hetiseSy tout ga. La guerre est finie, 
Travaillonsr 

Friends in Paris continue wonderfully kind 
about taking the long journey to Neuilly. In the 
last two days visits from F. T., Walter Lippmann, 
and Pierre Hamp, all of whom I, of course, inter- 
rogated on the Conference. F. T. quietly said 
that outsiders can know nothing, that no opinion 
is possible. Pierre Hamp scratched his black 
[ 198 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

head and spoke a pungent word against Clemen- 
ceau and the imperialists. But since he has been 
to the Lille region and seen with his ferreting eyes 
the destruction wrought by the Germans in the 
factories he knows so well, his passion for indus- 
trial recuperation more than ever dominates the 
rest. 

W. L. looks more harassed every time he comes. 
He now almost despairs of a victory of Wilsonism 
against special interests and imperialist ambitions. 
He says France wants it both ways — wants to 
guard her frontiers heavily and make a defensive 
alliance against Germany, and yet wants the 
League of Nations, without accepting its implica- 
tions of common trust and good faith. 

"How I envy you your detachment!" he sud- 
denly burst out. 

There spoke the editor! The only type of young 
American in my experience who longs to go back 
to his old job is the writer who has been muzzled 
by the censor, or precipitated into a life of action 
by the war. His stored reflections are beginning 
to choke him. W. L. can't wait to get home, out 
of uniform, back to the N. R. office. When he 
talked of the office his face began to change, and 
by the time he had taken some snapshots of his 
wife out of his pocket it was shining. Like Ernest, 
he has the best thing America or indeed the world 
[ 199 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

produces in the way of marriage: his wife is a 
lovely young contemporary who backs him — 
and is backed — in a destiny of freedom. Those 
are the marriages that stand the separations of the 
A.E.F. as the thousands of others one could point 
to do not. But I shall be glad when the various 
pairs in which I take an interest are reunited, even 
though W. L.'s impending departure again makes 
me feel like the one fixed point in a firmament 
that is shifting its stars like an August sky. 

January 15 
My last dressing is over. When the bandages 
came off to-day the deepest wound had closed — 
three months, practically, from the accident. 
Dr. M., very pleased with himself and me, leaned 
back in his chair, pushed up his grandfather spec- 
tacles, and said all that remained to be done was 
to borrow a large black felt slipper from some 
benevolent concierge, and put my stiff foot in 
charge of a "horny-handed Swede" — repre- 
sented as an ogre who loves to crack the bones of 
shrieking ladies. This could not take place for a 
fortnight. 

''What are two weeks to you? " he asked, noting 
my disappointment. ** You have years before you 
to cure that foot in." 

So has Northern France years, centuries, to 
[ 200 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

repair her devastation. But both the refugees and 
I are in a hurry. 

January i8 
Peace Conference officially weighs anchor for 
parts unknown, threatened — but unshaken — 
by thunder and lightnings from the American and 
British press on the subject of "open covenants." 
Nothing to be given out but a colorless and worth- 
less daily bulletin, agreed on by the principal 
powers. 

January 20 
Unexpected visit from the French surgeon who 
performed my operation at Mont-Notre-Dame. 
I was glad of the chance to express again my grati- 
tude for his great skill and kindness, but somewhat 
taken aback by his transformation from the weary, 
middle-aged, unshaven toubib of the black pipe 
into a dapper, pink-cheeked, correct young man 
not a day over thirty-five. Very smart blue uni- 
form, very varnished, pointed boots. 

He was intensely and genuinely interested, as 
French surgeons always are, to follow up the re- 
sults of his work, and admitted it had been a tour 
deforce of which he was somewhat proud. He was 
sorry to miss Dr. M. Might he venture a little 
advice? Go very, very slow with walking, be 
[ 201 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

very, very courageous about massage, try sun 
baths (in this weather!) and resign myself to at 
least four months more of hospital. For his part 
he was immediately sailing for Africa, to do post- 
war surgery. Africa ... a sudden vision of the 
inside of an ambulance and two staring Senegalese 
faces. . . . 

January 23 
I HAVE been completing my surgical education by 
watching Dr. M. operate for appendicitis. It was 
a real event, that seemed to strengthen my legs, 
and put a sort of foundation under the hospital 
world. How bloodless and decent the procedure, 
how delicate and exquisitely sure the hand of 
science. The doctor's terse comment, as he made 
his incision through the hole in the sheet, classi- 
fied the Y man on the table as neatly as the \ 
knife cut the skin: 

**No muscles? All in his knees, I suppose!" 

January 30 
The atmosphere of Paris is chimerical. Every 
one who comes to see me brings and confirms the 
impression. The Conference has become a source 
of deep resentment, for not even the so-called 
*' insider" knows what Clemenceau, and Wilson, 
and Lloyd George, and Orlando are brewing in 
[ 202 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

their secret still. But the rumor that it is a strong 
brand of moonshine begins to circulate. "The 
German colonies are to be divided as plunder." 
''The League of Nations will not be an integral 
part of the Treaty." The people just from Amer- 
ica are especially aghast. H. G., on her way to 
an important relief job in the Balkans, described 
her illusion of a series of concentric circles revolving 
in a vacuum. The inner circles are, of course, the 
four great powers, but even they scarcely touch 
each other in their rotation; and the smaller and 
oppressed nations turn madly on the circumfer- 
ence. She says people look to her like gnats sucked 
into this dusty orbit or that, whirled breathlessly 
round and round. 

I see Paris through the wrong end of the tele- 
scope, anyhow, which adds to the gnatlike effect. 
The hospital, in contrast, is presented always more 
microscopically to my gaze, its minuticE magnified 
far more than life-size. With its odd mixture of 
American Colony and Red Cross standards, its 
conglomerate medical and nursing staff, its pa- 
tients who vary from relief workers to ex-ambas- 
sadors and peace commissioners, it is a rather 
extraordinary cross-section of America in France ; 
but one is not constantly in a scientific mood. 
Both the unanimistic French tent, and the isola- 
tion of my very sick period here, were finer than 
[ 203 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

the immersion in petty detail gradually forced 
upon me by convalescence. 

The whole place ends by having glass walls — • 
and every ripple of the goldfishes' tails is revealed. 
I can't help knowing just how the distinguished 
statesman next door takes his tea and washes his 
face, and the secret whispered by Miss X. in the 
consulting-room is telepathically conveyed to my 
ears. The sound of a doorbell at midnight, a 
stifled masculine laugh, a flutter in the corridor 
— these are no longer meaningless noises, but 
notes of a very real and healthy existence which 
goes on inside the hospital, no matter who lives 
or dies. A sort of violin obligato with an almost 
cynical resonance, played high above the regions 
where the Y girl with pneumonia cowers from the 
spectre at the foot of her bed, and Mademoiselle 
V. cries miserably for a hypodermic. 

She is coughing terribly to-night. I can't bear 
to hear — pain, and sickness, and wounds ... I 
had accepted them. They gave me a deeper share 
in the common lot. But the common lot of the 
European world grows darker and darker. Too 
many people with coughs and wounds. Too many 
with no food. Too many to back against Catas- 
trophe and Destiny. Morbid old Europe — Miss 
O. is right, its walls are too high. Gradually 
I 204 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

they are growing together overhead, enclosing us 
in an airless dungeon in which we can only grope, 
like characters in a Maeterlinck play. Let us get 
back into the light. 

The luminous light that bums on the Arizona 
desert, out of long miles of untouched sage and 
sand. Yes, that's where I want to be, on an ob- 
servation car travelling swiftly into the South- 
west. Losing myself in the shimmer of fine dust, 
passing the bold, red ramparts of a land beloved 
of pioneers, and large enough to carry Europe in 
its pocket. 

February 3 
To dress again for the street; to drive again 
through the French night; to confront a restau- 
rant, full of lights and people; to sit down at a 
real table, with a real white cloth, and feast on 
canard cL I 'orange and escarolle salad, with a real 
bottle of Burgundy . . . 

The doctor is a sport, and it all felt like a 
steeple-chase. Involving, in fact, such a breath- 
less series of hurdles as I could never have jumped 
on crutches but for his urgent and joyously en- 
couraging voice at my back. He had generously 
decided I ''needed a change" — and carried out 
his decision with lavish efficiency, 
t 205 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

It was one of those misty-moisty winter eve- 
nings that swallow up landmarks and I strained 
my eyes in vain from the taxi to discover any- 
thing significantly ''different" in the dim streets. 
Larue's also looked — after my first mad dizzi- 
ness had subsided — much the same as before 
the Armistice. A pair of boastful young A.E.F. 
captains at the next table, completely immersed 
in their grudge against "the major'* were, for 
some occult reason, Dr. M.'s and my best dish. 
Their native flavor! The bond created between 
Americans in France by their common American- 
ism and the share it gives them in every other 
variety of Americanism is one of the emotions 
that does n't seem to have worn out. I can't 
possibly think of Paris now without us, in uni- 
form, overrunning it. What would Henry James 
say to that? 

' Hospital quiet was blissful to return to, though. 
Here, to-day, weary enough in my long chair, my 
old Harvard friend R. M. J. found me. He too 
is very tired and worn, but no less full of human 
spice — and trenchant observation and comment 
from Chaumont. We took a look down the per- 
spectives of history together, at the revolutionary 
Europe that is emerging so chaotically from the 
wreck of the old dynasties. Could it ever be 
worth the cost of the Great War? Perhaps. The 
[ 206 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

past does bear witness to costs unbearable con- 
tributing at last to the onward reach of man. 
But as to the Fourteen Points — the historian 
said that when the envoys were duly assembled 
at Spa nobody, not even the Americans, had a 
copy of them. They had to send to Berlin to 
get Erzberger's! Another little anecdote: the 
distinguished American envoy, to the captain- 
secretary who sits at his elbow in a stage whis- 
per: "The Palatinate? Palatinate? Where w the 
Palatinate?'* 

To-night my first stance with the Swedish 
masseur, Mr. M., who proves highly intelligent, 
indeed an almost delightful person — I wonder 
if my qualification is n't due to the woe he in- 
flicted — the head of a hospital for French war 
wounded. 

Sad survey of my left ankle. Home truths that 
nearly extinguished hope. Cheering assurance 
that I shall walk anyhow. Massage. Bending of 
the unyielding joint — a process which sounds 
and feels very much like an effort to separate the 
wainscoting from the wall. It brought beads of 
perspiration to Mr. M.'s forehead and extracted 
groans from me. This to be repeated every day 
■ — indefinitely. Yes, indefinitely. I may as well 
not blink the fact. 

[ 207 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

February 4 
The second dose of massage was worse than the 
first. But its badness has the virtue of making me 
feel something is doing. Feel that I am again 
lucky to fall into the hands of a specialist — • 
luckier than most of the thousands of wounded 
Americans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Canadians, 
Belgians, Italians, Serbians, Germans, Russians, 
who by an awful sort of geometrical progression 
magnify, pile up my infinitesimal "case" into a 
tremendous burden for the world's vitality to 
bear. The masseur has confirmed my fears for 
the soldiers crippled towards the end of the war. 
He says that even in France they will be turned 
out of the hospitals only a quarter cured. Class 
D . . . I gather all the under dogs of the universe 
to my heart, these days. . . . 

Harry Greene came just at the right moment 
to cure me of the psychology of the under 
dog. His kind, quizzical. New England face, his 
endearingly familiar Boston quaver, his air — 
through his faithful eye-glasses — of taking Paris 
and its mad preoccupations as frivolous and high- 
falutin and unimportant, compared to the serious, 
and steady, and unending parochial business of 
rebuilding Northern France, have given me a new 
[ 208 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

sense of reality. I think of my trips in his Ford in 
1 91 7, through the region of ruined villages, and 
little white crosses, and felled orchards of which 
he has so long been the faithful servitor. Lettuces 
sprouting in the shell-holes. Resolute old French 
folk in the cellars. If Harry went about pitying 
these inhabitants of the North instead of meeting 
them in the spirit of pioneering social service he 
would not be half the wonderful use he is. No 
place but for stoicism in this devastated world 
of which we are all citizens. Let us accept our 
part in the tragedy without expecting moral or 
physical compensation. "For the greatness of 
Reason is not measured by length or height, 
but by the resolves of the mind. Place then thy 
happiness in that wherein thou art equal to the 
Gods.'* 

The determination of the various nations to 
get their "just deserts," their real and final re- 
ward of virtue and suffering, is precisely the 
poisonous element in the Conference. It is that 
which may yet prevent an effective League of 
Nations. Wilson's voice is failing, failing, and 
the voice of self-pity and self-interest is swelling. 
The ironic idealists, like A. S., who with his wife 
does so much to make Neuilly happy for me, are 
beginning to express their doubts. He appeared at 
my door after lunch — from the garden where he 
[ 209 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

had tied his dog — with a poem which sets forth 
very plainly what 

Le prudent, I 'aimable marchand 
is trying to make out of the war and the peace. 

February 5 
The Paris dinner broke a spell. I am now at 
least half free. To-day the dear and handsome 
Peggy came, by permission of Dr. M., to spirit 
me away to lunch with her and Lucinda, and I 
braved a dining-room full of smart French officers 
where a certain famous princess — who must be a 
relative of Queen Mary — was solemnly eating 
omelette, gnocchi, chop and fruit in immaculate 
brown kid gloves. 

Even a chop hath charm, after lukewarm 
hospital fare, and so after a hospital room has 
a ** salon" — the salon with its German helmets 
and other trophies, its open fire and flowers, and 
the two radiant American girls who for so many 
young officers besides our beloved Stewart have 
made it a "home from home." 

Stewart, of course, was in the front of our 
thoughts. He had gone forth from the salon so 
gaily, and never, never more should we see him. 
. . . But his charming little philosophic coun- 
tenance seemed still to regard us from the angle 
[ 210 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

by the fire, charging us not to rarefy or heighten 
his soldier's end. We might, if we liked (he in- 
dicated) remember the fragrance of his roses, 
and when we drank "Chateau Yquem'' pledge 
him a secret toast. ... 

"Aren't you fascinated by the technique of 
surgery?'* asked Peg, after a pause, and told of a 
poilu with no face to speak of, whose arm was 
grafted to his forehead, sitting on the edge of his 
bed singing "Madelon," as he prepared to leave 
the Ambulance. Peggy had never been so well 
and happy as while nursing. Lucinda had in- 
vented a bandage which they had adopted at 
Blake's — nothing ever made her so proud. After 
the wards there were emptied she walked through, 
seeing the faces of the dead rise from their pillows. 
. . . Soldiers and surgery — every effort to dis- 
cuss purely feminine matters brought us back to 
them. The orientation of these so-called society 
girls is perfectly definite. They have seen the 
best of war — the extraordinary human heroism it 
calls forth, and the extraordinary skill of science 
in patching up what science has destroyed. They 
have seen the worst of war — its suffering and 
its waste. And it is all so near, so passionately 
absorbing. Both girls spend their time going to 
the other end of Paris to console "their" boys — 

[211 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

unfortunately now cared for in inferior conditions. 
The maddening American army — what was the 
use of the finely weighed and pondered wisdom 
of Blake's and the Ambulance if nothing was to 
be carried through, if the rest of the treatment 
was careless and ignorant? 

And what will happen, asked the girls, to these 
wounded heroes' characters, even if their limbs 
recover? Much as one adores them, with their 
grit, their grouch, their young inconsequence, 
those in Paris at least are spoiled. They are 
fairly gorged with chocolate by the various rival 
letters of the alphabet, so much so that they 
won't eat their regular meals. Refuse to learn 
handicrafts, as the poilus do. Hardly read even a 
magazine. Just lie around, expecting to be amused 
and petted, and watching for the "chow" cart 
in order to damn the contents. 

Peggy is shiningly "glad her fate is settled.'* 
Her very special officer husband is waiting for 
his orders, and she, now nursing is over, hates 
Paris. She went to a dance at the Aviation Club, 
but did n't enjoy dancing as she did before the 
war. No fun to dine at a restaurant either, and 
see a lieutenant spend his last hundred francs 
on you. No satisfaction (puts in Lucinda) to go 
to the opera with a peace-maker in a U.S. Gov- 
ernment car lined with striped velvet, when 

[ 212 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

Eastern Europe is starving, and your best patient 
is neglected. The Americans are doing the peace 
too lavishly. What are the Wilsonians accom- 
plishing? 

Stop, stop, my dears . . . Let me go back to 
the grey room ... As Lucinda leaves me there 
in my nurse's hands, I can only offer the usual 
spinster's advice: 

"The riddle of the universe doesn't seem to 
have been solved by the war. So why not, mean- 
while, decide to marry one of the faithful of the 
salon — for instance ..." But she is at the door 
and gives me only a dark, mysterious, little, good- 
bye smile. 

February 9 
Ernest is about to be transferred to Paris. All 
through the long, slow spring I shall have this 
brother-in-law turned brother to count on. I had 
to-night a foretaste of what it is going to mean 
when he jollied up the doctor and took me to dine 
at Prunier's; and was, I declare, as skilful as the 
doctor himself in getting me and my crutches to 
a table. 

The table was in the downstairs room — less 

chic than the inaccessible upper regions. The only 

other American a private with a vulgar little 

French dumpling of a woman, against a brawny 

[ 213 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

shoulder. Beside us in the corner sat a French 
lieutenant with a really beautiful girl — perfectly 
dressed, quiet and distinguished. He never took 
his eyes from her face ; every now and then reached 
across the table for her hand and kissed it. Yet 
there was delicacy even in this public avowal — 
every word they spoke, every gesture, his way of 
consulting her taste in ordering the dinner indi- 
cated an intimacy full of fine shades of under- 
standing. 

Ernest shrugged impatiently towards our rather 
offensive fellow-American : 

'*That bounder,'* he said, "is really no differ- 
ent in Paris from what he is at home. It is only 
that what is there furtive, back-alley ish, has come 
blatantly out into the open. Perhaps better so. 
Though he and his kind, with their rotten taste 
— or lack of taste — give the revolt from Puritan- 
ism an unpleasant cast. Almost never does a 
Frenchman offend good taste." 

I asked to what degree he felt contact with 
European mores had changed the moral standard 
of American men in general. 

"Ah, that's harder to say . . . such an indi- 
vidual matter. I know some who have really de- 
cided the European way is easier and pleasanter; 
who really have lost something — if it is a loss, 
as / believe. Others have merely gone through 
[ 214 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

a crazy phase due to loneliness, overstrain or 
some other aspect of war and will revert to nor- 
mal when they get home. But undoubtedly many 
a rigid Puritan has learned tolerance, and person- 
ally I think that is a gain — to discover that 
standards are n't absolute, that they vary with 
nations and individuals, that the measure of the 
rightness of a given relation is, in large part, the 
quality and beauty of the relation itself. But the 
ultimate effect on American life and manners? — 
Who knows . . . 

''I have a pretty definite impression, haven't 
you'* — he went on — "that our mores have fun- 
damentally stood the test — and what is more 
unexpected, justified themselves to the French. 
There I can speak positively. I see it in Dijon. 
You know I have made some wonderful friends 
there. There 's one girl — unmarried, of the an- 
cient local aristocracy and two or three years 
older than I . . . lives with her married sister, 
Madame S., who is one of the loveliest young 
women I ever knew. I 've got the habit of drop- 
ping in often for tea, and they both told me re- 
cently that I have made them believe in some- 
thing they never before thought possible — amitie 
between the sexes, affectionate friendship without 
sentimental complications. 

'* Even the young Frenchmen are impressed by 
[215] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

our strange ways. At first, of course, they simply 
couldn't *get' us at all — us and our Y girls. 
They thought it was all some sort of a hypocritical 
fake. But now they believe and rather admire, 
though some of them simply can't understand 
how it is possible for a man and a woman to go off 
for a day's excursion on mere comradely terms, 
or for a man like myself to have so many close 
friends among women and still care for only one. 

But there 'sD ;he told me he had been having 

an affair with ajeunefille in Dijon. He now thinks 
it was a mistake, especially for her, and says that 
he is done with that sort of thing forever. 

**But it's the French girls who have been most 
deeply affected — by watching our independent 
girls measuring up to their many responsible jobs 
— and especially by knowing our better types 
of American men. I can't tell you how many — 
girls I 've met in Paris and Tours and Dijon — 
have told me, with an air of real sincerity, that 
they could never go back to idle lives, and could 
only marry if they married Americans ..." 

Here our neighbor rose to help his gracious 
amie into her smart black satin cape and Ernest, 
cigarette in fingers, settled his shoulders back 
comfortably against the shiny leather cushion for 
a sympathetic contemplation of the couple. His 
dark eyes have such wisdom and power — and 
[216] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

I have watched both qualities deepen with each 
fresh sight of him. 

"Well, my dear, it's been a great experience, 
altogether?" 

** Great . . . yes, subjectively great indeed. Of 
course, my experience in the S.O.S. has been as 
different from the fighting soldiers as light from 
dark. Your friend Rick would n't think much of 
it. But it's just as fine in its way, I maintain. 
Look here ... a Captain I saw yesterday summed 
it up. He's been the head of an airplane con- 
struction plant in some little sandy hole — and 
he said he felt as if he could go home now and 
build the Panama Canal single-handed." 

"That is indeed the opposite of the fighters' 
rather disintegrated psychology — their sense of 
anti-climax." 

"Precisely," agreed Ernest. "The S.O.S. gives 
you a brace for life, whereas after the front life 
is inevitably anti-climax — for a while anyhow. 
After my work in the War Risk first, and then in 
the Intelligence I feel ready to tackle any job, 
however big — and get away with it, too, you bet. 
When the Colonel sent me to take over the newly 
opened ofhce at Dijon he said he did n't know 
the conditions and could offer no advice. *Go 
down and make good.' So I did. No more than 
every one else. We have all attacked perfectly 
[ 217 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

unknown jobs, without preconceived ideas, with 
no special tools or qualifications — and * made 
good.' Of course not in terms of absolute suc- 
cess — but in success measured against opportun- 
ity offered, yes." 

"But were n't there a lot of men with routine 
jobs, — plain drudgery?" 

"To be sure. And they'll go home as dull- 
spirited and fishy-eyed as they came. Because 
they did n't have the wits to get transferred, poor 
beggars. I 'm speaking of men of a higher calibre. 
And the most thrilling part, for them of course, — • 
if I may still subjectify — the thing that makes 
the A.E.F. experience different from any other 
one has had or can have again on this globe, is the 
freedom of it. Freedom from responsibility first." 

"But surely there's enormous responsibility in 
these hard jobs?" 

"Such an impersonal responsibility compared 
to those at home. Nothing to do, once the job 
is done for the day or week, but wait for your 
travel orders — and if they are n't forth coming 
get off without 'em!" 

"And then freedom from ties ... of course one 
would n't, of one's own volition, drop below the sur- 
face of life, and duck off to another world, leav- 
ing behind everything one most values. Wife and 
baby . . . job, house, and committees . . . one did 

[218 1 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

it because it was the right thing to do, because 
one had to take a part with the rest of humanity. 
But it is nevertheless a precious and wonderful 
opportunity. Wild as I get with homesickness, I 
look forward enormously to these coming Paris 
months . . . the work and its problems . . . the 
infinitude of evenings, Sundays, and long lunch 
hours and talk. God, — what I Ve learned about 
the art and philosophy of living in France . . . 
Just because, for the first time, I 've had leisure 
to observe ... to ' savour er lentement la vie' . . .If 
only Katharine could get that passport and spend 
the Spring here it would be complete . . . but even 
without her we'll both be the better for it . . , 
you understand?" 

**I certainly do. It's hard on the wives, but 
I believe if I were God Almighty organizing a 
world I 'd include a period like this one of yours 
in the existence of every young man who like you 
began to live seriously and responsibly so young 

— a new field to test his powers, a chance to get 
his personal and lonely bearing with the universe 

— before the plateau of thirty, the burdens of a 
growing family, the Panama Canal!" 

"It was a great school for swelled heads too," 
ruminated Ernest. *'We are none of us likely to 
exaggerate our individual contribution. We see 
its utter insignificance — except to ourselves." 
[ 219 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

'* But we also begin to see what the sum of our 
tiny contributions amounted to in the A.E.F. 
Something pretty big . . . something to be proud 
of . . ." 

February i6 
This is a black night in the rue Chauveau. The 
Paris of the Americans is all very well till one sees 
the Paris of the French. I have again been to a 
literary tea-party on the quai^ again pushed open 
the Henri IV door above the Seine and found my- 
self in the salon with the Gauguin over the divan 
and the Blanche on the left wall, in the presence 
of a charm and a mystery . . . France is again 
chez elk. 

It is almost the first time since the war that I 
have seen her so. When I arrived in 19 17 her chez 
elle was invaded by foreign hordes, and she was 
seeking to be hospitable — especially to the Ameri- 
cans. (Was I not lodged in this very room last 
winter? I can't believe it.) It is perhaps natural 
that in our crass hotels and hospitals we have 
not sufficiently taken in the change from war to 
peace. We are still transatlantiques, leading an 
abnormal, transplanted existence connected with 
the touristic and suburban regions of this ancient 
city, — with the blatancies of the Champs Ely- 
sees and the boulevards, with the monotonies 
[ 220 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

of Neuilly rather than with the intimacies and 
exclusions of the rive gauche and the Cite. Our 
peace Paris differs only in chromolithograph de- 
gree from our war Paris. The French war Paris, 
as M. Jean Giraudoux and I once agreed, was 
like an i8th Century print — a place of noble 
architectural perspective, every broad and empty 
street sweeping upward to some wide-winged 
Louvre, or colonnaded Od6on. But the French 
Peace Conference Paris is a painting with all the 
richness and depth of tone, all the subtleties of 
value in which that perhaps greatest of French 
arts abounds. Only a French painter of the first 
tradition could have rendered that literary in- 
terieur as I saw it to-day, with its distinguished 
women in plain black with square-cut necks, its 
slim jeune fille serving tea, its young novelists in 
picturesque army disguise, and its solemn groups 
of bearded, black-coated elder gentlemen using 
the subjunctive tense with care, and never re- 
ferring to an Allemand as a Boche, 

What made the difference from literary tea- 
parties of the winter of 1918 — the ones where our 
host was home on leave? It was n't that he was 
no longer in uniform, or that the room was really 
warm — filled with a delicious, diffused heat — 
or really bright with candle light, and fire light, 
and flowers. These were contributory factors. 
[ 221 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

But the cause and centre of the change was 
spiritual. France had come home. The war was 
won in her favor, and she had at last retired into 
her ancient interior, shut her hoary, hand-hewn 
door and settled to a kind of converse with her- 
self in which the ally of yesterday had no real 
share. ''There are only two civilized nations in 
the world, the Chinese and the French." Where 
did I hear that phrase? In this very salon, years 
ago? It came back to me as I sat in my comfort- 
able chair, listening to the talk of the French 
literati, 

A mandarin certainly the intellectualist critic 
of Bergson whose small, hard, pale visage glooms 
out of a corner by the fire. A mandarin certainly 
the tall, emaciated young man with the eye- 
glass, who writes prose exactly as Debussy writes 
music, and walks in old Paris like a poet in green 
fields. Here comes the novelist of the slow, fine 
smile — his Polish wife in her piquant blue cap 
smiles too, from afar — who cannot romance 
nowadays until after nine at night. ''Till then 
I belong to all sorts of vague entities — France, 
internationalism!" He is translating Henry 
James because he "understands him** although 
— a distinction worthy of the setting — he does 
n't understand English. The black-coated eld- 
ers seem to be discussing the newest books: 

[ 222 ] 



[THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

Riviere's *'rAllemand," the prison record of a 
literary critic who has discarded the usual reasons 
for hating the Germans in favor of others more 
damning; Gasquet's *'Hymnes." The warm Pro- 
vencal Gasquet ... it was he who showed me 
Verdun ... My host approaches with the big 
volume. *'You must read it," he says, *'like a 
symphony." 

I was welcomed with all the old kindness — 
with an added touch of gentle solicitude since 
this was my first French sortie. Little direct 
mention of Wilson, little of the Conference, less 
of the Quai d'Orsay. And yet the sense that the 
peace was going ill was all-pervasive. Why was 
it going badly? Ah, that was exactly the point. 
These hypocritical British with their "mandates," 
these Americans with their ignorance of tradition, 
and their ten thousand horse-power idealism — 
were they not combining against France? The 
mandarins seemed to nod agreement to an Anglo- 
Saxon Menace. When I got up to proceed to the 
door again on the arm of my host, and the com- 
pany rose, bowing, from their dusky corners, I 
read on those intelligent, sympathetic faces a 
recognition and a warning; a most delicate recog- 
nition of what a foreigner had chanced to meet 
of misfortune on the fields of France; a most 
subtle warning that the day of the foreigner 
[ 223 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

had nevertheless ended. Surely, surely something 
sharp, something fearful, something deeply re- 
sentful about Wilson and his policy was waiting 
to be spoken as soon as courtesy permitted. The 
moment the great door closed behind me it would 
issue, with sibilant clearness, from every pair of 
lips. 

The echo of that unspoken word followed me 
in my drive past the captured guns piled on the 
place de la Concorde. Emblems of glorious vic- 
tory? Sad, smoked milestones of a past already 
unreal and obscure? Spars washed ashore by 
the great wave of America's old love for 
France, France's old reliance on America? Beloved 
A.E.F., you had better hurry home. Dear Wil- 
sonians, your footing on French soil grows preca- 
rious. In that electric-lighted Crillon, the focus 
of your earnest energies, the hive of your buz- 
zing idealism, can you possibly detect what a 
Frenchman is saying and thinking behind an 
Henri IV door? 

So it was for this division, this severing into 
rival camps and understandings, it was for these 
feuds born of our brains that our hearts brought us 
across the sea? The draft Covenant of the League 
of Nations is just to be presented. And I think 
of Spire's poem: 

[ 224 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION, 

Et voiW 

II a fallu dix millions d'hommes, 

Dix millions dltommes couches d terre, 

Sanglants, perces, ouverts; 

Rdlant, sans une goutte d'eau pour leurfihre, 

Sans un haiser pour leurs levres. 

II a fallu dix millions d'hommeSj > 

Pour ce vieux reve d' enfant, 

Cette chose si simple. 

Tti vas V avoir, ta Societe des Nations! 

Chacun va livrer ses armes. 

Chacun va livrer ses bateaux. 

Plus de heurts, plus de chocs, plus de haines! 

Plus de querelles, meme entre freresi ^ 

Nous aliens ouvrir un grand livre; J 

Nous allons peser toutes choses 

Dans une surprecise balance: 

Pour le juste, la recompense; 

Pour le mechant, la peine juste; 

Et le fils ne payera plus pour la faute du pere. 

Dix millions d'hommes, dix millions d'hommesl 
Que c'est peu, mon Dieul que c'est peu 
Pour cette chose si precieuset 

* . * 

S.S, RochambeaUj May lo 
We steamed out of the port of le Havre at sun- 
set. Several thousand doughboys crowded on the 
lower forward deck, clinging like great swarms 
of brown locusts to masts and spars, cheering in 
[ 225 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

high falsetto, waving to the little weeping groups 
of French admirers on dock and jetty. But mostly 
facing, straining with an almost painful ecstacy 
to that lighted Western world hidden beyond the 
dip of the blue sea. 

"Children, wonderful children,'* sighed Joe 
Smith from the rail beside me. "All soldiers 
are children. But ours are the youngest in his- 
tory." 

The soft veiled glow of the French May eve- 
ning, falling wide across the water, seemed centred 
and concentrated on these youngest faces in 
history, giving them an epic look I can never 
forget. A look compounded of hunger for home 
and wistf ulness at stern adventure ended ; a look 
of new patience and old memory, and sharp, 
secret yearning for something bigger than earth 
and sea, and war and peace, which the sliding 
waves and the oncoming dark lifted almost into 
sublimity. How will the mothers and wives feel 
the first time they note that strange look in these 
faces . . . When, sitting apart in front of the lit- 
tle frame house, the man stares out, unseeing, be- 
yond the prairie and the mountains. 

The water swished and foamed, the air struck 
salt to our hearts, the grey roofs of France re- 
ceded into the slaty night. But still a long streak 
of yellow flamed across our bow, and still a few 
[ 226 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

black forms clung slant to the black spars, above 
the dim, crowded rows now stretched on the 
deck, 

"I don't want to see no other port till I get to 
the Golden Gate. Best little old harbor in the 
world!" 

"It is, you know!" 

Will not the great unwritten American novel 
be the true story of two American ''buddies'' 
who came to France and went home again? 

4e Hi * 

Lucinda has settled me in my steamer chair in 
the dark, and gone to walk off her blues with 
Joe. (A most sad Captain was left behind on the 
dock. The most deserted, most despairing Cap- 
tain I have ever seen. I wish I dared to send him 
a wireless to-night, bidding him to lift up his 
spirit.) What a sense of liberation to have swung 
off into the fresh Atlantic currents away from 
illness and hospitals, away from Paris, where one 
seemed to be always 

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
The other powerless to be born." 

Ten days of detachment ahead, like the blessed 
detachment of the evacuation train. 

Several months since I have tried to set down 
any impression of the outside world. It crowded 
[ 227 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

too close, once I had ceased to see entirely with 
other people's eyes. My limping journeys into 
Paris disclosed a pattern too complex, a back- 
ground too obscure. Americans growing always 
more depressed and baffled, Frenchmen more 
vindictive and dissatisfied, Italians more angry 
and headstrong, Englishmen more cocksure and 
domineering, and the protagonists of the smaller 
nations more futile and querulous. Wilson 
dwindling from a demi-god, justifying the fears of 
conservatives and deceiving the hopes of radicals. 
Ukraine and Hungary and Bavaria going Bolshe- 
vik, Bulgaria, Roumania, Poland, Czecho-Slo- 
vakia in ferment, Egypt, Korea in revolt. Sparta- 
cism spreading in Germany, Russia blockaded 
and starving, France startled by apparitions of 
bankruptcy and social revolution. The Peace 
Conference muddling and floundering along in 
secrecy and doubt till it became the butt of 
every boulevard wit. Four days ago, on the 
anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, the 
compendium of its tragic labors was presented 

to the German delegates at Versailles. 
* * * 

And yet, how utterly inviolate the French 

countryside through which we journeyed this 

morning. It seemed that the giant fires which 

had burned the skies, and the jarring voices 

f 228 1 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

which had pierced the air but yesterday were 
quenched and stilled forever, and those velvet 
green undulations, those silver squares of beech- 
wood, those tufted grey villages preserved in 
some timeless ether to calm and exalt the souls 
of men. Will France be able to mellow her 
hazardous victory, as she mellows pears against 
those old red brick walls, and turn it into her ripe 

fruit of civilization? 

* * * 

It was characteristic of my excellent friend 
F. F. to turn up at that early morning boat train. 
His spirits were pristine like the hour, and he 
kept me jumping from one steep intellectual crag 
to another — to him a station platform is as good 
as any other for humane and political discourse 
and a lame leg no detriment to acrobatics — 
while Ernest and Joe and Lucinda engineered the 
vulgar bestowal of my luggage, and the finding 
of a seat. Gradually I became so heavily laden 
with problems of Zionism and of the universe, with 
books, and newspapers, and pressing messages 
for New York, Boston, and Connecticut, that I 
could scarcely climb aboard. We had begun to 
get up steam when he rushed back to call through 
the carriage window: 

"Hoover told me yesterday he hasn't been 
able to get any food into Russia, in spite of the 
[ 229 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

Allied promises. Tell the N.R. they must keep up 
the fight!" 

Russia ... In a private dining-room of a res- 
taurant on the Champs Elysees we are six at the 
table. On the right of our cosmopolitan and ac- 
complished hostess a face that is both mystical 
and material, lined and grey as fifty, yet in its 
plump contour decidedly less than forty. A 
round, shaven, pugilistic head. A pair of ex- 
traordinarily sensitive and beautiful hands which 
make staccato gestures. A voice that rises, 
harshly swells, suddenly drowns the tiny room 
in a flood of oratory big enough for the Trocad6ro. 
The mirrors and panelled doors seem to crack, 
but the voice roars on, condemning the Allies for 
lack of help in time of need, condemning the 
Bolsheviki, condemning Kolchak — till suddenly 
it breaks and shrivels on a note of truly Russian 
self- analysis and self-distrust: 

"And they call me a weak man ..." 

At which our gifted Florentine host, in his 
diplomat's voice, hazards a smooth, underlined: 

''Mais, M. le president . . ." 

The words are magic. Something like a bath of 

soothing oil spreads slowly over the cropped 

head and the grey face. Complacency dawns. 

The tense table draws a long breath and the 

[ 230 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

tactful host inquires: ''Now, M. Kerensky, what 
practical measures will you suggest to the Confer- 
ence when you get a hearing? ..." 

But the voice only grumbles and thunders. 

Then there was Bill Bullitt in his tweed suit, 
discoursing in an attic of the Crillon, immediately 
under that roof where an American sentry is 
even yet stalking gloomily up and down. (If he 
did n't, of course, spies might slip down the 
chimneys.) This heat, this vision, these definitive 
views for practical Allied action disturb the wor- 
thy statesmen in the ceremonial chambers below. 
He haunts them like a nightmare, but they won't 
allow him any daylight reality. Right or wrong, 
they have hidden their eyes and stopped their 
ears . . . 

Just here appear Joe and Lucinda to break the 
thread of memory and guide my wobbly ankles 
over the slewing deck. Lucky person that I am 
to have two such charming, proven faces and four 
arms so steady to help me from the hospital to 
my family. For it was hard to leave Ernest 
behind. 

"My God! " he suddenly broke out to F. F. on 
the platform. "She's going to see my wife in ten 
days. . ." 

[231 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

May 15 
Where is that detachment of mine? I have left a 
hospital that had become a home, a garden where 
spring was stirring, for the maelstrom, the vor- 
tex, the processional of American democracy. 
All day past my chair they tramp, tramp, tramp. 
(Feet are miraculous to me now. I watch them 
as if they were mechanical toys.) Women war 
workers in their tailored clothes of many hues, 
demobilized ambulance men with orange ribbons, 
officers who have had their uniforms recut in 
France and learned to carry themselves easily. 
Portly spiritual advisers to the troops from cen- 
tral Illinois, whose insignia is a red triangle; 
bankers and lawyers from Oregon and Washing- 
ton, marked with the red cross — in those sky- 
scrapers to which they are returning they will, 
to the end of their days, be addressed as "major." 
Trig lieutenants late of some New York depart- 
ment store, guiding by an elbow girls from the 
East Fifties and Sixties who would once have 
resented it. Faces wracked, or grave, or flippant, 
buttonholes with decorations or without; those 
who have sealed their service in heart's blood, 
and those who have written it in sand and dust — 
round and round and round . . . Too pervasive, 
too pressing for an observer who has just emerged 
from a still, grey room. 

[ 232 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

Yet if I were Rodin or St. Gaudens, wanting 
to create for some spacious Washington vista 
a heroic monument to the American effort in 
France, I should ask no better than to be drawn 
into this monotonous procession. I should pause 
at the bow where a chaplain lifts up a flat voice 
to rows of blinking faces: "You are going back 
to an Era of Reconstruction . . . Bigger and 
Better America ..." I should linger at the 
stern, where happier doughboys, perched on 
boats, console the piquant nostalgia of French 
war brides. And when evening came, and the 
decks grew silent and empty I should go out and 
commune with the swirl of the mid-Atlantic. 
And gradually these men and women and their 
varying purposes, their differences of tempera- 
ment, and class, and organization would be fused 
and sublimated. 

The monument that appeared out of the fog 
would differ from all other war monuments in 
one striking particular : behind the young soldier, 
following his bold, swinging movement across 
the sea with quieter rhythm, would come a femi- 
nine image — the American woman, first in his- 
tory to follow her men to battle. I see her as a 
rather generalized athletic figure, of no special 
age, with a face worn to a serenity as immanent 
as that of a Greek grave relief. To pledge the 
[ 233 ] 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

souls of men against their destiny, however ugly 
and dark it appeared; to show the depth of hu- 
man tenderness in an almost impersonal and 
universal spirit — this was what her service 
implied. This was what the soldiers them- 
selves demanded of her, however far they wan- 
dered from Puritan pastures. Cheap flirtation, 
fine personal adventure, traditional romance . . . 
but beyond, behind, maintained at greater cost 
than the home-keeping women folk will ever 
know, the gallant comradeship of the sexes on 
which our civilization rests. 

Somehow my synthesised American woman be- 
gins to looks very much like the vivid Gertrude, 
after all . . . Gertrude who appeared swiftly out of 
Germany in her blue coat on an April Sunday, to 
try to free some soldiers from prison. Up to the 
end my visitors continued to come thus, like mes- 
sengers in Greek tragedy, bringing tidings from 
some far country. 

The President was the supreme messenger of 
the gods, materializing out of a void with raised 
hand to speak words which should stay the 
course of Destiny. Little they seemed to avail. 
Yet, Wilson, Gertrude, F. F., are right in this: 
history is not something that happens but some- 
[ 234 ] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

thing to be fought for and directed by our own 
wills, something to be wrought out of the cross- 
purposes of Paris 1919 as well as out of the mud 
of the trenches. If Dr. M.'s knife had faltered 
by a fraction of an inch Mademoiselle V. would 
have died on the operating-table instead of 
smiling, as I left her, in the Neuilly garden. . . . 
If a new horse-chestnut leaf, blown by the tem- 
pest, falls here instead of there, the course of the 
world's progress will be changed ... ah, there it 
goes, into the Seine, under the feet of a British 
statesman, crushed by the wheels of a sight- 
seeing American truck which boasts that the 
debt to Lafayette is paid. 

Poor President, we have asked him in his 

solitary person to be not merely the messenger 

of the gods, but the magician who would catch 

the leaf in mid-air, the sculptor who would mould 

the mud into marble, the surgeon who with one 

sure thrust would pierce the malady of Europe. 

Perhaps to speak words of divine humanity was 

his sole mission. . . . 

* * * 

My ankles ache in the dark sea-damp. But I 
rest against the pulse of the engines throbbing, 
throbbing, throbbing like implacable time itself 
as we steam towards New York. 
[ 235 1. 



SHADOW-SHAPES 

We all fear a little our encounter with that 
vast, tumultuous city, whose clangor comes to us 
dimly over the sea. What scorn of human des- 
tiny in that clangor, what fierceness of hope after 
a Europe of pain, and death, and despair. . . . 

We all dread a little the definition of the city's 
jagged outline. Famished, arrested faces of young 
wives begin to take shape on the dock. (How 
shall I greet one dear, wistful figure who somehow 
cannot help hoping he has come along . . .) 
Behind the wives, sisters, mothers, fathers — still 
faces listening for a tale that will never be told. 

For adventure was only the keen edge of the 
experience with which our slow-moving Rocham- 
beau is so heavy laden. Tragedy was its blade. 
I catch an arrowy flash in the clear American 
sunshine, where young men in civilian clothes 
move swift beyond the waiting crowds. Their 
busy patterns of new life are traced in something 
hard and bright. 

Beyond the young men unscathed green country 
where children are at play. Quaint little face of 
Nancy, deliciously smiling under an Alice in 
Wonderland comb, in a garden that slopes down a 
hill. Scrambling of bare legs and arms, tinkling of 
lemonade in a white house on a Turnpike by a 
tidal river where a voice reads Froissart . . . 
History out of a book. 

[ 236] 



THE CITY OF CONFUSION 

It is to-morrow which cows us, as a high trage- 
dian said long ago. The Coming Thing, greater 
perhaps than to-day or yesterday, throbbing 
out its portent in the dark hospital night, loom- 
ing and lurking behind the mirage of a familiar 
shore. 



THE END 



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